A studio juvenile who grew into a plain, dependable second lead, Marshall Thompson never became the star his early promise suggested. His best-known work is in company: one soldier among several in Battleground, one man among the animals in Daktari.
Fi1m perspective
In Battleground (1949) Marshall Thompson is Jim Layton, one of the squad William Wellman keeps in a foxhole outside Bastogne while the snow comes down. He is not the loudest man there and the film does not want him to be. Our own review did not single him out, and we mean that as description rather than complaint: the picture is about a unit, and Thompson does the unglamorous work of being part of one. It is the kind of part he did well, and it is where we would start.
The career before it was a studio career. Universal signed him in 1943 for juvenile roles and MGM took him on in 1946, where he played the boy next door in the studio's 1940s pictures; John Ford had already given him Ensign Gardner in They Were Expendable (1945). When the contracts ended he went freelance in the 1950s, and freelance in the 1950s meant monsters. There is Fiend Without a Face, and there is It (1958), the terror from beyond space, in which he is Colonel Carruthers aboard a rocket with something loose in the ducts. Anyone who has seen Alien will recognise the shape of that story, and It is often named as one of the places it came from. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, but the part belongs to the second Thompson, the level-voiced officer who had replaced the boy.
Then Africa. A location shoot for East of Kilimanjaro (1957) took him there, and he said afterwards that the trip alone had been reason enough to take the job. The 1960s were spent on the animals: Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion (1965), which he starred in and helped write, and Daktari (1966–1969), four years as the vet Dr Marsh Tracy, both with the producer Ivan Tors, who made three films with him. In between he directed A Yank in Viet-Nam (1964). Of the wildlife footage he said, "Everyone should have one elephant charge in his life. It picks up the metabolism," which tells you something about the temperament.
He never became a star, and the last two decades are television guest parts and supporting roles in films, among them Carter in The Turning Point (1977), a film we liked for Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine and in which, once again, he is not the man we wrote about. His final role was in McBain (1991). We were more moved by Battleground than we expected to be, and by nothing in particular: by a squad allowed to grumble and shiver and be frightened in studio snow, Thompson's Layton among them, and by a film that never asks any of them to be a hero.
If you want to see what he did, start in the foxhole and finish with the lion, and do not expect to remember him from either as sharply as you remember the company he kept. That was the job, and he did it for nearly fifty years.
Biography
Marshall Thompson (1925–1992) was an American actor. Born James Marshall Thompson in Peoria, Illinois, he was signed by Universal Pictures in 1943 and appeared in several of the studio's feature films before moving to MGM in 1946.
He played Jim Layton in the war film Battleground (1949). Thompson later worked as a freelance actor on a range of pictures, including the science-fiction film It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), and appeared in television series such as Angel (1960–1961) and Daktari.
