John Qualen spent forty years at the edge of the frame, usually Norwegian, usually decent, usually about to be taken advantage of. Then Ford gave him a candle and a lost farm in The Grapes of Wrath, and the small part is the one we remember.
Fi1m perspective
A man is found hiding in an emptied farmhouse in Oklahoma, and Gregg Toland lights him with a single candle held under his face, so that the room around him is black. He is Muley Graves in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and John Qualen has the first half hour's hardest job: to explain, to the Joads and to us, how a family gets cleared off its own land. He describes the day the tractor came. Ford cuts to him kneeling in the dirt while the caterpillar knocks his house off its blocks, and there is no villain in the frame; the boy driving the tractor is a neighbour who needs the three dollars a day. Qualen does not turn any of this into a speech. He says what happened, and it got at us harder than most of what follows, because a small man telling the plain truth about his own ruin is more frightening than any bank.
That was the exception in a long career of being useful. Qualen came to the screen from Broadway, where he had been the Swedish janitor in Elmer Rice's Street Scene in 1929; he played Carl Olsen again in the 1931 film, and the same year made Arrowsmith, his first for John Ford. He stayed in Ford's company for more than thirty-five years and nine films, usually in the working-class or immigrant parts at the side of the picture: Lars Jorgensen in The Searchers (1956), Peter Ericson in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Away from Ford he was Earl Williams, the bewildered condemned man in Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940), and Berger, the Norwegian resistance contact in Curtiz's Casablanca (1943). Well over a hundred films, and then television.
What he did was the accent. Scandinavian, mostly, Norwegian or Swedish, put to comic use or attached to a decent man about to be cheated. He could do the Midwest when a director let him, and in the dramatic parts he dropped the comedy altogether and was better for it. The reservation is the obvious one, and it is the only one anybody has ever made about him: a man that reliably Norwegian gets asked to be Norwegian, in westerns and in bits, for the rest of his working life.
Ford knew what he had. He gave Qualen the candle and the tractor and let him play the scene with nobody to blame, and the result is the one place in a career of dependable support where the support is what you take home. Start with The Grapes of Wrath. Then go and find him in the others; he will be near the back, with an accent, doing his job.
Biography
John Qualen was a Canadian-American character actor of Norwegian heritage who specialised in Scandinavian roles. He began his career on Broadway in the late 1920s, gaining attention as the Swedish janitor in Elmer Rice's Street Scene; he recreated the part in the 1931 film adaptation. That same year he appeared in John Ford's Arrowsmith, beginning a collaboration that lasted more than thirty years.
Qualen appeared in well over one hundred films and worked extensively on television into the 1970s. Among his notable roles were Muley Graves in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Earl Williams in His Girl Friday (1940), Berger in Casablanca (1943), Lars Jorgensen in The Searchers (1956), Peter Ericson in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Deputy Sheriff Sulo Kangas in Anatomy of a Murder (1959). He frequently performed roles with various accents, usually Scandinavian.
