Frank Faylen spent thirty years in the small parts, the cabbie and the cop with three lines, and made most of them stick. Once, in The Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder gave him a hospital ward at night, and he was frightening.
Fi1m perspective
He arrives late in The Lost Weekend (1945), in the alcoholic ward, as a night attendant called Bim Nolan. He has seen a thousand men like Ray Milland's Don and he tells him so, kindly, as a matter of professional fact. We found him the most frightening thing in the film, and the fright is all in the kindness. He is not cruel. He is simply certain about how this ends, and Faylen never raises his voice to say so.
He had been in pictures for a decade by then, mostly uncredited, mostly at Warner Bros., playing the cop, the cabbie, the bartender. Through 1950 he was working at a rate of around a dozen films a year, which explains both why the face is familiar and why the name on the credits so often was not. A year after Bim came Ernie the cab driver in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a small friendly part in a film we rate very highly, and the two roles between them mark out his whole territory: the ordinary man who can be trusted and the ordinary man who cannot, played with the same face and much the same manner.
What he did was watch. In a scene built for the star, Faylen is the man at the edge of the frame who plainly has an opinion about what is happening and is keeping it to himself, and that is why a bit part of his registers when the scene around it does not. He had been doing it since he could stand. Recalling his parents' vaudeville act in 1948, he said: "I had a line in the act which I spoke on cue. I raised my bottle and said, 'bottle.'" It is as good a description of the character actor's job as we know: one word, on cue, and the audience remembers it.
The reservation is the obvious one. He was a bit player who was handed two proper parts in consecutive years, and the business took the hint only once more, on television, where he spent four years as Herbert T. Gillis, the long-suffering father in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–1963). He turns up early as Tim in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and late as Keeney in Funny Girl (1968), after which he stopped. Nobody built a film around him, and nobody should have; his gift was for the two minutes that make the rest of the scene look honest. Watch The Lost Weekend for Milland, and then notice who you are still thinking about when the lights come up.
Biography
Frank Faylen (born Charles Francis Ruf, also credited as Francis Charles Ruf) was an American actor. He began his career in vaudeville as a child with his parents and later worked as a stage actor before entering films in the 1930s. He appeared in numerous productions, often in uncredited or supporting roles.
Faylen is known for film roles including a soldier in Gone with the Wind (1939), Tim in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), 'Bim' Nolan in The Lost Weekend (1945), Ernie Bishop in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and Keeney in Funny Girl (1968). On television he played Herbert T. Gillis in the series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–1963). He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
