Gene Evans

In Shock Corridor (1963), Gene Evans spends most of his time on the floor. His Boden is a physicist whose mind has gone back to childhood, one of the three witnesses the film hangs on, and while the others get to shout he sits and draws pictures. It is a small part in a loud film and Evans plays it small. Anyone who knew him from Fuller's war pictures would have felt the jolt: the man who was Fuller's sergeant, now down on the floor drawing. We found him sadder than the script has any right to make him, because he does nothing to ask for our pity; he just keeps drawing.

Fuller made him. The Steel Helmet (1951) was Fuller's first Korean War film, and Fuller wanted Evans for Sergeant Zack when the studio wanted somebody else. He got him, and Zack is still the part people mean when they say his name. Evans had been an army sergeant and combat engineer in the previous war, and it is his soldiers, in The Steel Helmet and again in a second Korean War film for Fuller the same year, that people who write about him keep coming back to: practical, unglamorous, plainly drawn from experience. Park Row (1952) gave him a lead as the newspaperman Phineas Mitchell, for which he lost thirty pounds, and it is the performance most often put next to Zack. Five films with Fuller in all, Shock Corridor the last.

Away from Fuller he was what the trade calls a heavy, or a sheriff, or a sergeant again, in Westerns and war films and on television, with the red hair and the gravel voice doing much of the work. My Friend Flicka (1956–57) let him be a father for two series and showed a gentler man than the films asked for. Operation Petticoat (1959) put him in a studio comedy beside Cary Grant and Tony Curtis as Chief Molumphry. Sam Peckinpah used him twice, in The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), and Walking Tall (1973), with Evans as Sheriff Al Thurman, was more or less the last big feature before he took himself off to a farm in Tennessee and kept acting in local theatre. He never turned much down, by his own account, and the record shows it: dozens of parts, most of them supporting, a good many of them the same man in a different hat.

Evans knew what he was. He said he was never a star, since a star is like a champion who fights once or twice a year because he can afford to; he was a club fighter, who had to fight at least once a month or starve. That is fair, and it is also a little hard on the work: the club fighter got the best of a director who did not hand out the best to many people. Start with Shock Corridor, which we have reviewed and which uses him briefly to show what a career of sergeants left unused. Then find The Steel Helmet, and see the sergeant.