A block jaw, a hard voice and a face that said the system was not going to apologise. Harold J. Stone was Hollywood's dependable authority figure for three decades, rarely given more than a few scenes and seldom wasting them.
Fi1m perspective
The detective in The Wrong Man (1956) is not a villain. He is a man doing his job, on the other side of a mistake he has no reason to suspect, and Harold J. Stone plays him as someone who has done this many times before. Stone had the face for it: the block jaw, the Roman nose, the grey-black hair, and a deep, steady voice that sounded like a form being filled in. Casting directors looked at him and saw the state, the firm, the unbending father, the mob. For thirty years he was handed those parts, and he played them.
He came to films late, after the Yiddish stage, radio and Broadway, with The Blue Dahlia in 1946, and 1956 was the year he was noticed: The Harder They Fall with Humphrey Bogart, Paul Newman's drunken, abusive father in Somebody Up There Likes Me, and Hitchcock's Detective Lieutenant Bowers. Bogart took notice. The lead never followed. Instead came thirty-odd films through the 1970s, among them Spartacus (1960), X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) and The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967), where he was Frank Nitti, and more than 150 television appearances in Gunsmoke, The Untouchables, Hogan's Heroes and The Twilight Zone. Television is where most people met him, usually as the man behind the desk saying no.
The trouble with being reliable is that nobody writes you a surprise. Stone was typecast as the heavy from the mid-1950s onward, and the part he liked best was the one that went against it: Hamilton Greeley, the publisher in My World and Welcome to It (1969), a comedy, in which the jaw and the voice were allowed to be funny. It was not a direction anyone followed up.
His last film was Hardly Working (1980), his third with Jerry Lewis, and it is a poor send-off. Lewis hands him the post office and leaves him there, and watching him stand in James Pergola's flat, bright light waiting for a gag that does not arrive, we felt a pang. This was Paul Newman's father and Hitchcock's detective, and he was finishing on somebody else's punchline. He did what he could with it, which was always his trade, and then he retired.
"I don't think there are any roles I haven't played," he told his granddaughter. He had in fact played one role a few hundred times, and the measure of him is that it kept working. If you want to see what a Hollywood character actor was for, watch The Wrong Man and keep an eye on the detective. He is not the story. He does not need to be.
Biography
Harold J. Stone was an American character actor in film and television. Born Harold Hochstein in New York City on 3 March 1913, he began his career on Broadway in 1939 and appeared in productions including One Touch of Venus and Stalag 17. He made his motion-picture debut in The Blue Dahlia (1946).
Stone played supporting roles in films such as The Wrong Man (1956) as Det. Lt. Bowers, Spartacus (1960) and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). He appeared in more than 150 television guest roles from the 1950s to the early 1980s, including episodes of The Twilight Zone, Bonanza, Get Smart and Mission: Impossible. He received an Emmy nomination for an episode of The Nurses.
