Gilbert Roland was handed the Latin lover and the Mexican bandit for nearly sixty years, and made a career of refusing to play either one stupid. In small parts he is exact and unhurried. Hollywood lost the leading man early.
Fi1m perspective
The Cisco Kid, as Gilbert Roland played him in six Monogram films in 1946 and 1947, stops in the middle of being a bandit to quote Shakespeare. Nobody had written that in. Roland added it, and later explained why: "I wanted to make sure the Mexicano was not portrayed as an unwashed, uneducated, savage clown." That is the whole career in one habit. Hand him the Latin lover, the outlaw, the man with the accent, and he hands you back someone who reads.
He began as an extra in 1923, went under contract to Paramount and was a leading man opposite Clara Bow and Norma Talmadge in the middle of the 1920s. Sound cost him that. Through the 1930s he made Spanish-language versions and supporting parts, and the parts got narrower and more Latin as the decade went on. The Cisco Kid films brought him back, and from We Were Strangers (1949) for John Huston he settled into the work he is remembered for: matadors, revolutionaries and men in charge, in The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) for Vincente Minnelli, Thunder Bay (1953) for Anthony Mann, and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) for John Ford, as Dull Knife. He kept going, in features and on television, until Barbarosa in 1982.
The part of his we know best is the one in She Done Him Wrong (1933), where he is Serge Stanieff, one of Mae West's lovers, and arrives with Rafaela Ottiano and a suitcase of trouble. The film is 65 minutes long and exists to let West walk, sing and look at Cary Grant; Roland's job is to be one more thing for her to look at, and to look back with meaning. We liked him more than the part warranted. He plays every glance as though it carries the plot, and in a film whose crime plot is in bits, the glances very nearly do. In Around the World in 80 Days (1956) he is Achmed Abdullah, one cameo among dozens in a three-hour travelogue, and the slideshow the film turns into over the Pacific is not his doing.
What he could do, by common consent, was give a small part weight without asking for more screen time. What he was never given again, after sound arrived, was the lead. That is the one real reservation anyone has raised about him, and it is a reservation about Hollywood rather than about Roland. He seems to have decided early that a supporting part played with dignity was worth more than a lead played as a clown. Watching the Cisco Kid pause for the Bard, it is hard to say he was wrong.
Biography
Gilbert Roland, born Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso, was a Mexican-born American actor. His career in film and television lasted from the 1920s until the 1980s.
Roland appeared as Serge Stanieff in She Done Him Wrong (1933). He played supporting roles in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Thunder Bay (1953) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and featured in Around the World in 80 Days (1956). He received Golden Globe Award nominations in 1952 and 1964, and was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. Roland served in the United States Army Air Corps during the Second World War.
