Dub Taylor spent half a century at the edge of the frame: the sidekick, the old-timer, the man in the bowler hat and the long johns. He never carried a film and he did not need to. He made the ones he was in look lived in.
Fi1m perspective
Look at the fringe of almost any Western made between 1939 and 1990 and there is a fair chance he is standing in it: heavyset, grizzled, wearing a bowler hat that belongs to no century in particular and the top half of a set of faded long johns as a shirt. Dub Taylor was never the man the film was about. He was the man the film needed next to that man, saying something rustic or foolish or shrewd, and then stepping back so the plot could carry on.
He came out of vaudeville, and it was the xylophone rather than the acting that got him his first job, as Ed Carmichael in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You (1938). Columbia then put him under contract and made him Cannonball, the comic sidekick, in more than fifty B-Westerns from 1939 through the 1940s, riding alongside Bill Elliott, Russell Hayden and, fifteen times, Charles Starrett. He dropped the Cannonball name at the end of the decade and became what he stayed for the rest of his life: a character actor, in Westerns, comedies and dramas, with No Time for Sergeants (1958) among the early comedies and recurring television work in between. In the mid-1960s Sam Peckinpah took him into his stock company, and they made four films together, including The Wild Bunch (1969), where Taylor is the Reverend Wainscoat in the opening sequence.
The one we have reviewed is Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in which he is Ivan Moss, a father, and what Moss does we will not describe. Our review does not single him out, and that is rather the point of him. Arthur Penn's film lets you laugh at the getaway and then puts a bullet through a face, and we found, going back to it, that the laughing depended on the faces around Dunaway and Beatty being ordinary and plausible, Taylor's among them; the film likes its killers more than it should, and it is the character players who make that liking feel like something you might do yourself, in that farm country, in that decade.
The nearest thing to a reservation anyone has ever raised is that the parts were small. They were. He was still working in 1990, as a saloon old-timer in Back to the Future Part III, alongside other Western veterans, and he was still working when he died in 1994. He put it plainly himself: "Acting is the most embarrassing business in the world. You never know when you’re going to eat." He ate for fifty-six years. If you want to see what he did, watch Bonnie and Clyde and do not look for him. He will be there anyway.
Biography
Dub Taylor (1907–1994) was an American character actor. A vaudeville performer, he made his film debut as Ed Carmichael in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You (1938). He originated the comic sidekick Cannonball in The Taming of the West (1939) and played the role in more than fifty films over the following decade.
Taylor worked extensively in films and on television from the 1940s to the 1990s, often in Westerns but also in comedies. Notable roles include Ivan Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Reverend Wainscoat in The Wild Bunch (1969) and the saloon old-timer in Back to the Future Part III (1990). He was the father of actor Buck Taylor.
