Lyle Talbot said yes to everything for half a century, from Warner leading man to the Nelsons' neighbour to Ed Wood's general, and he was steadier than most of the films around him. In the one we have reviewed he is asked for nothing and supplies it.
Fi1m perspective
In One Night of Love (1934) Lyle Talbot is Bill Houston, the boy from home, and when we reviewed the film we said he was given nothing to play but patience and a dinner jacket. That is not a slight on him. Grace Moore had the voice and Tullio Carminati had the tyrant teacher, and the script needed a third person to stand at the edge of the frame and wait for the plot to come back round. Talbot waits. He does it in a Columbia musical the way he would do it for the next forty years in whatever he was handed, and the handing is the story of his career.
He arrived in Hollywood in 1931 or 1932 out of tent shows and stock theatre, with a company of his own behind him and a baritone that suited the early talkies, and Warner Bros signed him. Three on a Match (1932) put him beside Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak; Ladies They Talk About (1933) showed he could be pleasant or unpleasant as required. Then he joined the first board of the Screen Actors Guild, the studio let his contract go in 1936, and the leading parts went with it. What followed was B-picture leads, then character work until 1960: gangsters, villains, authority figures, the affable man next door. He was the first actor to play Commissioner Gordon in live action, in Batman and Robin (1949), and the first to play Lex Luthor, in Atom Man vs. Superman (1950), and neither seems to have changed his life much.
Television did. He was Joe Randolph, the neighbour, on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet from 1952 to 1966, and kept turning up in guest parts into the 1980s. He also made three films for Ed Wood, including Glen or Glenda (1953) as Inspector Warren and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) as General Roberts. Those are the films a certain kind of viewer knows him for, which is hard luck on a man who had been a Warner leading man in 1932.
The strength and the weakness are the same thing, and he named it himself: "I never turned down a job, not one...ever." An actor who takes everything is a gift to a studio and a hazard to his own filmography, and Talbot's has cheap, poorly received pictures in it alongside the Warner pre-Codes. We will admit that watching One Night of Love we felt a small pang for him, standing about in evening dress while Moore sang and Carminati bullied her towards greatness, because he is so plainly a professional and the film has no use for one in that spot. Then we went back to Moore, which is what the film wanted.
It is hard to think of another actor who was Lex Luthor, the Nelsons' neighbour and an Ed Wood general, and who appears to have minded none of it. If that sounds like a small kind of career, try turning down nothing for fifty years and see how it goes.
Biography
Lyle Talbot (born Lisle Henderson) was an American stage, film and television actor. He began his career in tent shows and stock theatre before moving to Hollywood, where he appeared in his first film in 1932 under contract to Warner Bros.
Talbot appeared in more than 150 films, including Three on a Match (1932), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), College Coach (1933) and several Ed Wood productions such as Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), in which he played General Roberts. He was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild and served on its first board of directors. On television he played Joe Randolph, neighbour to the Nelsons, for ten years in the series The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–1966).
His career, which spanned seven decades, is recounted in the 2012 book The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century by his daughter Margaret Talbot.
