Discover Top Posts Tagged with #al bridge

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) Preston Sturges

September 5th 2023

#hail the conquering hero #1944 #preston sturges #eddie bracken #ella raines #william demarest #raymond walburn #georgia caine #franklin pangborn #freddie steele #jimmy conlin #esther howard #al bridge #bill edwards #harry hayden #elizabeth patterson

The Spirit Of The West (1932)

Partners of the Plains 1938

#hopalong cassidy #william boyd #russell hayden #harvey clark #gwen gaze #hilda plowright #john warburton #al bridge #al hill #earle hodgins #john beach #bob burns #jim corey #herman hack #bud mcclure #westerns #western #western movies #western movie

AL BRIDGE TOO FAR!

Al Bridge is one of my favourites in the Preston Sturges stock company of beat-up character comedians, shopworn vaudevillians and superannuated silent comics. Joining the gang for Sturges’ second film as director, Christmas in July (1940), he hung on until 1949, when The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend brought the great comedy auteur’s Hollywood career to an end.

It’s impossible not to love cranky William Demarest or fruity Franklin Pangborn, but Al Bridge never went out of his way to be lovable and his screen persona had little in it to inspire conventional affection. Several stages beyond hangdog, his surly, crumpled face suggests a badly-shaved mastiff that’s died after eating something terrible. The liquefying countenance flows down his neck towards the floor, pulled by heavy jowls of such pendulosity they seem to be dragging the very eyes out of his head. Those eyes! Pitiless in their sarcasm, they might be beady if the drooping lids did not occlude nine-tenths of their surface.

The whole Bridge body is in this half-melted condition, but he can move about a bit, I’ll give him that, propelling the carcass on spindly limbs of gnarled bone and gristle. I think Bridge might be ALL gristle, some anatomical freak of nature, an experiment in rendering the human body indigestible to predators. No wonder he appears in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock as the proprietor of a menagerie including one moth-eaten lion.

Bridge’s voice is a wheedling whining drawl, expressing a wide range of emotions simply by remaining flat at all times, save when rising in querulous irony. It’s the vocal equivalent of a hand, sliding palm-down across a surface towards an unsuspecting insect, slowly and evenly, only to abruptly rise and strike down with crushing finality.

I find him endearing. Even as the vicious “Mister” in Sullivan’s Travels, as close to a melodramatic villain as Sturges’ cinema contains, he has an quaint, disfigured humanity about him. Quick to wield the whip or condemn an inmate to the cooler, he’s solicitous in conversation with fellow state-employed brutes, and allows his prisoners a weekly film show, if only for reasons of plot.

And sometimes Bridge’s characters have a heart of gold. His disagreeable manner as a small-town lawyer in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is a put-on, as he takes no fee after dispensing this remarkable confession: “Look, I practice the law: I am not only willing but anxious to sue anybody, anytime, for anything.” Good or bad, his characters are all life’s survivors, if only barely. They’ve seen what life has to offer, and found it marginally preferable to instant death. Only Bridge could pour sufficient disdain into his reply to Harold Lloyd’s “I could make you a very attractive offer,” in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock: “You couldn’t make me an attractive offer, not if you got down on your bended knee and threw in a set of dishes.”

by David Cairns

#David Cairns #The Chiseler #Al Bridge #he Miracle of Morgan’s Creek