A gaunt face and a voice that sounds older than whoever owns it: John Carradine spent nearly six decades playing preachers, vampires and one owl. Held down, he was among the best character actors Hollywood had. Let loose, he was something else.
Fi1m perspective
The voice arrives before the face does. In The Secret of NIMH (1982) there is no face at all, only a drawn owl in a hollow tree, and Carradine gives it a voice as dry and old as the tree. We sat up when it spoke. It sounds like something that has already outlived everyone it has ever met and is not much troubled by that. That is the instrument: deep, exact, trained on Shakespeare, and attached to a long, hollow-cheeked face that directors reached for whenever a scene needed a preacher, a villain or a man to deliver bad news at length.
He came up on stage in New Orleans in 1925, reached film in 1930 as Peter Richmond in Tol'able David, and did voice work for Cecil B. DeMille before John Ford took him into his stock company in the mid-1930s. Ford used him eleven times. In Stagecoach (1939) he is Hatfield, one of the passengers Ford takes the trouble to know before the shooting starts, and the film is better for it. In The Grapes of Wrath (1940) he is Casy, the preacher who has lost his calling. Ford kept him on as far as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), where he plays Cassius Starbuckle.
The thing he could do, when he chose to, was less. Casy is the part most people point to, and rightly: a man with that voice and that face holding both of them back, so that when the voice does rise it lands. The trouble is that he did not always choose. He played Dracula in House of Frankenstein (1944) and kept playing him, and by Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966) the holding back had gone and the cape had taken over. He said of his career, "Directors never direct me. They just let me loose," and you can tell, picture by picture, who let him loose and who did not. Ford did not. DeMille, who cast him as Aaron in The Ten Commandments (1956), let him be large because the film was large. The cheaper the production, the wider the eyes.
He was known to recite Shakespeare in public without being asked, and something of that survives in the performances: a man who likes the sound of a good line and will make sure you hear all of it. It is a virtue in a Ford Western, where the lines are good, and a liability in a film where they are not. The later decades were full of low-budget horror, and he worked through them without complaint and without, as far as we can tell, ever lowering the voice.
Start with Stagecoach and The Secret of NIMH, the two we have reviewed, and watch what forty-odd years did. In the first he is one face among nine on a coach and you notice him anyway. In the second the face has gone and the voice is doing the whole job, and it does not need any help.
Biography
John Carradine (also credited as John Peter Richmond, Peter Richmond and John Carradine Sr.) was an American character actor. He appeared in more than 200 films, often in supporting roles in Westerns and horror pictures, and maintained a parallel stage career in Shakespearean roles.
He began in theatre in the mid-1920s and made his screen debut in Tol'able David (1930). Carradine became a member of Cecil B. DeMille's stock company and later John Ford's, appearing in Ford films including Stagecoach (1939) as Hatfield, The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Other notable credits include The Ten Commandments (1956) and voice work in The Secret of NIMH (1982). He continued working in low-budget films into the 1980s.
Carradine died in Milan, Italy, on 27 November 1988.
