JUST IN: Scott MacGillivray Finds Another Showman Turned Actor
Not a big star perhaps, but Gene Roth (nee Eugene
Stutenroth) was an actor who emerged from ranks of exhibition to become a
mostly malign presence in westerns, comedy shorts, serials, wherever kids learned
him by sight for raw deals dispensed to screen heroes. Writer/historian Scott
MacGillivray sent Greenbriar the dope in wake of today's Babe Hardy post, along
with illustrations shown here (as ever ... Thanks, Scott!). Gene Roth had been
with Loew's Brooklyn circuit and before that a Warners man in Philadelphia venues. He had a particular
interest in pipe organs as an ongoing feature in theatres he managed, and was
proficient at fabrication and installation of same (see his letter at left to The
Motion Picture Herald). When war looked imminent, he offered skill toward
manufacture of combat planes at Lockheed, and while visiting studio lots, was
tabbed for uncanny resemblance to a certain German officer named Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl,
the subject of a war actioner then before cameras. From that inauspicious
start, Stutenroth was on his way to a career in movies (while also pulling
four-hour daily shifts at Lockheed).
There were parts, mostly small, not all of them
"speaking," in features like The Hitler Gang, Charlie Chan In The
Secret Service, The Spider Woman, Song Of Russia, Canyon Passage, many more.
Gene also got lots of work at Columbia,
where he'd be an all-purpose heavy. To that he was well suited for stout
carriage and imposing size. There were westerns that cast him as "agitator
in bar" or "poker player," many of these silent and seated. The
Three Stooges used Gene for pomposity's punch bag, a cream pie's likeliest
target. Serials yielded more of Roth; as principal menace to Captain Video in
that 1953 serial, he'd enrich one of the decade's most perversely enjoyable
chapter-plays. A face like Gene's never lacked for work, being an ideal fit to
genres that seemed here to stay. That wouldn't be the case, of course, B
westerns and serials ultimately drying up, but GR made the segue to TV and kept
at it. He died in 1976.
I saw Gene Roth in a 1964 episode of Rawhide, entitled Incident At Deadhorse with Broderick Crawford, Burgess Meredith, and Chill Wills. Roth had dropped so much weight he was nearly unrecognizable, thin as a rail!
ReplyDeleteIn 1976 I went into a liquor store on the corner of Hollywood and Highland and thought the guy behind the counter looked awfully familiar.
ReplyDelete"Are you...Gene Roth?" I asked.
He gruffly ackmowledged he was, but seemed slightly embarrassed to be seen bagging bottles on the Boulevard, so I simply said I'd enjoyed his work over the years and left.
The next week I read he'd been hit and killed by a car at the very same intersection.
What a great anecdote. I'd read that Gene Roth worked at a liquor store in later years, but here is first-hand confirmation. Thanks for supplying it.
ReplyDelete