Joe Mantell spent forty years as the friend on the next stool, the man who asks what you feel like doing tonight and, decades later, tells you to forget it. Two lines people still quote belong to a supporting player most of them could not name.
Fi1m perspective
Two men in a diner with a whole Saturday night and nothing to put in it. One asks the other what he feels like doing; the other asks him back; it goes round again. That is Angie in Marty (1955), and Joe Mantell plays him without a trace of a comic timing you could point to, which is why it is funny and then not funny at all. Twenty years on he is Lawrence Walsh in Chinatown (1974), at Jack Nicholson's elbow in the last minute, telling him to forget it. Between those two lines is a career.
It began with uncredited bits in 1949, after the Army, and a name change from Mantel. The turn came on live television in 1953, when Delbert Mann directed him as Angie opposite Rod Steiger in Paddy Chayefsky's Marty for the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse; the 1955 film had him do it again. After that the work was mostly the small screen, two Twilight Zone episodes among them, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Mannix, Mission: Impossible, with film parts arriving now and then. He played Walsh once more in The Two Jakes (1990), then stopped.
What he did was be ordinary in a way that read as true. The Brooklyn voice, the suit that fitted a man with a job, the readiness to let the lead have the scene: he was cast as the sidekick and the associate because he made the star look like someone with a life around him. In The Birds (1963) he is the travelling salesman at the Bodega Bay bar, one of the townsfolk arguing about what the gulls are up to. Our review of that film does not mention him, and that is more or less the point; the scene works because everyone in it is furniture, and he is very good furniture. The exception is The Twilight Zone's Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room (1960), where he is alone with a mirror for most of the running time and has to be both the coward and the man in the glass telling him off.
We found the Marty exchange sadder each time we heard it. Angie is the one who keeps asking, and Mantell lets you see that he asks because the silence is worse, not because he expects an answer. It is the plainest acting imaginable and it is the reason the routine is still repeated.
The Marty attention did not turn into a film career, and the sequel to Chinatown was generally judged a disappointment, so the record is a couple of famous minutes and a great many competent hours nobody remembers. That is the job he chose, or the job that chose him. Watch Chinatown again and notice that the man whose task was to stand slightly behind the star is the one who gets the last word.
Biography
Joe Mantell was an American film and television actor. Born Joseph Mantel in Brooklyn, New York, he began his screen career in 1949 and remained active until 1990.
He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Angie in the 1955 film Marty, a role he had first played in the 1953 television production. Mantell is also known for portraying Lawrence Walsh, associate to Jack Nicholson's private detective, in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), in which he delivered the film's memorable closing line, and for reprising the part in the 1990 sequel The Two Jakes.
His other screen credits include a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and numerous guest appearances on series such as The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Mission: Impossible.
