Franklin Pangborn made one man, prim, polite and easily flustered, and played him for thirty years behind hotel desks and dining-room doors. It is a narrow trade. He worked it with more precision than most actors bring to a lead.
Fi1m perspective
He is usually standing when we first see him, behind a desk or beside a door, hands folded, chin up, and something is about to go wrong. Franklin Pangborn's men, the desk clerks, managers and headwaiters of thirties and forties comedy, exist to have their order disturbed, and the joke is how fast he talks and how much dignity he loses per sentence. In Stage Door (1937) he is Harcourt, the fussing man to Adolphe Menjou's producer, and he is funny for about as long as it takes to open a door. That is also roughly the length of the part.
He came to it late. He had been on Broadway from 1911 and in stock companies, and did not make a film until 1926, with Exit Smiling. The thirties were shorts, for Sennett and Roach among others, and then features, and by Design for Living (1933) the type was fixed: Mr Douglas, courteous, officious, easily upset. From there he was handed round the comedians as a foil. He played opposite W.C. Fields three times, among them as J. Pinkerton Snoopington in The Bank Dick (1940), and was set against Harold Lloyd, Olsen and Johnson and the Ritz Brothers as well. Then Preston Sturges used him in five films, including Sullivan's Travels (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), and he kept working in supporting parts and some television into the fifties.
What makes it work is that he never plays the man as a fool. He plays him as somebody who has kept a lobby tidy for twenty years and cannot understand why nobody else thinks that matters. The speed of the speech is not panic to begin with; it is competence, and panic is what it turns into. We laughed at Harcourt in Stage Door before he had got the door open, and then felt a little cheap about it, because the whole joke is a man who wants to do his job properly in a building full of people who do not. In Sturges's films, which are crowded with people talking over one another, he is funniest as the one man in the scene trying to keep it in order.
The limits are plain. He played essentially the same flustered character for the better part of thirty years, and the films rarely asked him for anything else. In Sullivan's Travels he is Mr Casalsis, and the part is small enough that our own review did not find room for him, which we suspect is the usual fate of a Pangborn credit: you remember the face and lose the name. Later historians have read the primness of some of these characters, in International House (1933) among others, as a gay stereotype the films of the time never said out loud, and once you have noticed what the writers were leaning on it is hard not to see it every time.
Start with Stage Door, and watch the man in the scene nobody else is watching. He is doing more work than the people talking.
Biography
Franklin Pangborn (23 January 1889 – 20 July 1958) was an American character actor who appeared in numerous feature films, typically in small comic roles. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he began his career on stage after an encounter with actress Mildred Holland led to touring work from around 1910. He served in the US Army during the First World War.
Pangborn became known for playing officious, flustered figures such as hotel clerks, tailors and managers. Among his credited roles are Mr. Douglas in Design for Living (1933), the tailor in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Billy Moon in A Star Is Born (1937), J. Pinkerton Snoopington in The Bank Dick (1940), Mr. Casalsis in Sullivan's Travels (1941) and Mr. Thompson in Now, Voyager (1942). He also appeared in several films directed by Preston Sturges and worked with W. C. Fields. A star was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in his honour in 1960.
