Ray Collins was the man behind the desk: the boss, the judge, the lieutenant, played with a settled weight that made authority look like something he had been born holding. He was rarely the point of a film and almost never the weak part of one.
Fi1m perspective
The Ray Collins we remember is already seated when the scene begins, and he behaves as if the chair were his and everyone else had been waiting for him to fill it. Politicians, lawyers, judges, businessmen, detectives: his parts were the men who had arrived before the hero did, and he gave each of them a stern, comfortable heaviness that could shade, when the writing allowed, into something harder to read. He is not the man you watch. He is the man the man you watch has to get past.
He came to the pictures late and thoroughly prepared. He was on a professional stage at thirteen, in 1902, and by the 1920s had worked through vaudeville, stock companies including his own in Vancouver, several Broadway plays and, by the count usually given, nearly 900 stage roles. The Depression sent him to radio in the early 1930s, and from 1934 he was part of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre company, taking several parts in the War of the Worlds broadcast alone. When he finally faced a film camera, as the political boss Jim W. Gettys in Citizen Kane (1941), he was fifty-one, and the part asked for exactly the settled weight he had spent nearly forty years acquiring.
Welles is the director who understood him best, and the association runs through The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), where he is Jack Amberson, to Touch of Evil (1958), where he is District Attorney Adair. Our review of Kane does not stop on Gettys, and that is fair: Welles keeps the film about Kane. Around the Welles pictures Collins made more than 75 films through the 1950s, among them The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), as Mr Milton, and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), where he showed a comic timing the graver parts seldom called on.
We enjoyed him more than we expected to in The Racket (1951), and we are not sure we should have. He plays Welsh, the judicial candidate, as oily in the practised way, corruption worn as good manners, so that he is the most relaxed man in a film where everyone else is either straining or, in Robert Mitchum's case, barely awake. It is a modest film and he does not lift it. He does make his corner of it more comfortable than it deserves to be.
Most people who know the face know it from television, as Lieutenant Arthur Tragg, the shrewd homicide detective of Perry Mason (1957–1964), a part he played across 127 episodes. Start with the Welles films, where the weight has somewhere to go. Then, when an afternoon repeat of Perry Mason turns up, notice how little he has to do to make a room feel that it is being looked at.
Biography
Ray Bidwell Collins (also credited as Raymond Bidwell Collins) was an American character actor whose career spanned stock and Broadway theatre, radio, film and television.
Born in Sacramento, California, he began acting professionally as a teenager and accumulated hundreds of stage roles. In the 1930s he worked extensively in radio drama and became a regular with Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre company. He made his feature-film debut in Citizen Kane (1941) as political boss Jim W. Gettys and appeared in further Welles films including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Touch of Evil (1958).
Collins acted in more than 75 films, among them The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), The Heiress (1949) and The Fountainhead (1949). One of his best-known television roles was Lieutenant Arthur Tragg in the series Perry Mason (1957–1964).
