A long face, an unblinking stare and a Swiss accent that French casting heard as German: for fifty years Howard Vernon played officers, doctors and villains, mostly in films that did not deserve him. Melville, once, gave him a whole one.
Fi1m perspective
Howard Vernon is the man at the back of the shot you assume is in charge. The features were long and hard, the eyes did not move when everyone else's did, and his French came with a Swiss edge that French directors heard as German. For half a century they put him in a uniform or a white coat and let him stand there. It usually worked, and it usually cost him the film.
We have reviewed one of his pictures, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (1956), in which he plays McKimmie, the Sponsor, and we will be honest: he made no impression on us at all, and our review does not mention him. That is not a complaint about Vernon. It is the trouble with a career spent in supporting parts: when they are done properly you do not notice them.
He was born in Baden-Baden and raised in Switzerland, speaking French, German and English, which explains the voice and what French cinema did with it. From 1945 he was a supporting actor in France and was cast, over and over, as a Nazi officer. Melville, in his first feature, saw something else. Le Silence de la mer (1949) gave Vernon the centre of a film as Werner von Ebrennac, a cultured German officer billeted with a French family who refuse to speak to him. It is his most substantial dramatic part and the one to seek out. After it he went back to the edges: Fritz Lang's last film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960), John Frankenheimer's The Train (1964) and, uncredited, Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965).
Then Jesús Franco. The Awful Dr Orloff (1962) began a partnership of around forty films in which Vernon was mad doctors, authority figures, Cagliostro and, in Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972), the Count. In 1994 he told an interviewer that the Franco films were not all good, but that without Franco he would only ever have played German officers, and with him he had been a lawyer, a murderer, a doctor, a thief and Dracula, and still had the teeth at home. That is the fairest account of the partnership we know. The films got cheaper through the 1970s and gave him less to do; the stillness and weight he carried into them are the reason anyone still watches them.
He worked into the 1990s, turning up in Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen (1991) as the Frog Man, a face from another cinema entirely. Start with Le Silence de la mer. Then watch Bob le Flambeur and look harder than we did. If after that you want the Orloffs, you will already know.
Biography
Howard Vernon (born Mario Walter Lippert) was a German-born Swiss actor. He appeared in nearly 200 film and television productions between 1945 and the 1990s, often in supporting roles.
Vernon trained and worked initially as a stage and radio actor. After the Second World War he played in French films, including The Silence of the Sea (1949) and Bob le Flambeur (1956), both directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. From the 1960s he appeared in many low-budget horror and exploitation films directed by Jesús Franco.
He also worked with directors including Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, 1965), Fritz Lang, Roger Vadim and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, 1991). Vernon was additionally active as a photographer and dubber.
