Fritz Feld spent half a century playing the same waiter, the same maître d' and the same vague European aristocrat, and made one small sound his own. It is not a large talent. It is an exact one, and it lasts.
Fi1m perspective
Fritz Feld's best-known contribution to the cinema lasts about half a second. A hand comes up flat and claps over an open mouth, and out comes a small pop, like a cork leaving a bottle. He used it to mean superiority, or annoyance, or both at once. He first did it as a waiter in If You Knew Susie (1948), and having found it he kept it for the rest of his working life. Most character actors would give a good deal for one trick that clean.
The career behind it is longer and stranger than the gesture suggests. He began in Germany in 1917, on screen in Der Golem und die Tänzerin and on stage with Max Reinhardt, and came to America in 1923 with Reinhardt's production of The Miracle. He stayed. Silents gave way to sound, and from the late 1930s to the 1980s he appeared in more than 140 films, with a great deal of radio and television alongside, before a last film part in 1989. A Reinhardt apprenticeship and then sixty years of taking coats: that is the shape of it.
What Hollywood wanted from him was a face and a voice, and he supplied both without fuss. The pencil moustache and the accent of no fixed country, usually somewhere between France and Belgium, got him headwaiters, hotel staff, counts and eccentrics. In Bringing Up Baby (1938) he is Dr Lehman, a psychiatrist, which in a Howard Hawks farce makes him the one man nobody is going to listen to. Our review of that film does not stop for him, and that is honest: at that speed nobody stops for anyone. We laughed at him there before we had worked out who he was, which is close to the highest tribute a supporting player can hope for; the accent arrives a moment before the man, and the moustache confirms it.
The charge against him is that he played one character in dozens of pictures, and the charge is fair. Nine films with Jerry Lewis and two with Mel Brooks did not stretch him so much as re-employ him; in History of the World: Part I (1981) he is a maître d' again, this time in the Roman Empire. Only Barfly (1987), where he plays a bum, hints at something he was rarely asked for, and it came late. He called emigrating "one of the two best decisions I ever made in my life." We would like to know the other one.
Start with Bringing Up Baby, where he has the best company he ever kept. After that, put on anything with a restaurant in it and wait for the hand.
Biography
Fritz Feld, also credited as Fritz Feilchenfeld, was a German-American character actor. Born in Berlin, Germany, he began his career in German cinema in 1917 with a screen debut in Der Golem und die Tänzerin and later worked in the United States from the late 1920s.
He appeared in over 140 films across seven decades. Feld is known for roles including Dr. Lehman in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Jardinet in At the Circus (1939), and supporting parts in Hello, Dolly! (1969), Barefoot in the Park (1967) and History of the World: Part I (1981). He frequently played maître d's, aristocrats and eccentrics, and developed a trademark mouth-slap "pop" sound first used in If You Knew Susie (1948).
Feld also appeared in numerous television series such as Batman (1966), Bewitched (1964) and Magnum, P.I. (1980). He was married to actress Virginia Christine from 1940 until his death in Los Angeles on 18 November 1993.
