The Heaviest of Them All - The Film Noir Legacy of Raymond Burr

Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
The Heaviest of Them All
The Film Noir Legacy of Raymond Burr
Carl Steward
www.filmnoirfoundation.org I SPRING 2011 I NOIR CITY
59
A
t the Raymond Burr Vineyards in the Sonoma
County’s pastoral Dry Creek Valley, the winery’s tasting room doubles as a mini-monument
to Burr’s long and successful acting career.
On one wall there are more than a dozen TV
Guide covers featuring the actor, either as dashing defense attorney extraordinaire Perry Mason
or wheelchair-bound chief of detectives Robert T.
Ironside. There are two Emmy Awards gleaming
on a shelf behind the bar, along with a selection of
plaques and honors stretching across the wall. Photos of Burr are everywhere, either alone or with the
casts of his hit TV shows, and there’s even a nod to
his earlier days as a costume drama stage actor.
Lovingly assembled by his business and life partner Robert Benevides, who still owns and operates
the Northern California winery, the room is a small
shrine to one of Hollywood’s most distinguished and popular actors.
But there is definitely something missing among all this Hollywood
memorabilia—namely, any trace of Burr’s seemingly endless gallery
of villains, conjured between 1947–57, when film noir’s dark heart
was fibrillating at a breakneck pace.
So,—where’s the badness? Where are the creeps, the cads, the
con men; the degenerates, the connivers, the kooks? Where are the
calculating, cold-blooded killers who populated the first decade of
Burr’s screen career? Where is Rick Coyle? Nick Ferraro? Harry
Prebble? Nick Driscoll? J. B. MacDonald? There isn’t even a hatboxsized space reserved for Burr’s most famous and familiar heavy—the
frosty-haired, blade-wielding wonder of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear
Window, Lars Thorwald.
All of these malevolent characters were brilliant Burr variations
on the bad-guy stereotype. He not only played more villains than any
other actor of the late 1940s and early ’50s, he gave them more depth
and dimension. And he didn’t play scoundrels and toughs only in film
noir: he elicited his evil in Westerns, horror and adventure flicks, period pieces—he even played a henchman with the unlikely monicker
Alphonse Zoto in the Marx Brothers’ 1949 comedy
Love Happy.
It’s no secret that Burr grew weary of being always cast as a heavy, despite his constantly fluctuating weight. But he didn’t dismiss the period of his
career in which he demonstrated his greatest range,
and surely he would not have wanted it ignored. In
a revealing 1963 interview on Canadian television,
the actor admitted that a good number of his Hollywood efforts were forgettable, but he lauded such
films as Pitfall, Raw Deal, and Rear Window as as
worthy productions.
In the same interview, he maintained that it
wasn’t being typecast as a villain that troubled
him, as much as finding fresh ways to interpret villainy. This is, after all, a guy who played creeps
named Nick in three separate movies. “I began to
run out of ways of being bad,” he said with a wry grin.
Indeed, in movies that could be classified as noir, Burr played
more than 25 bad-guy roles. On a few occasions, he got to play
a cop, and in two memorable performances—A Place In The Sun
(1951) and Please Murder Me (1956)—was cast as an attorney (a
portent of his stardom as CBS’s courtroom icon.)
But Burr’s bad guys deserve their own Wall of Fame, even if it’s
the wall of a post office or an alley somewhere in the meanest district
of Dark City. Here’s a Most Wanted list of the heaviest heavies, both
well known and obscure, for the Raymond Burr Museum of Mayhem.
DESPERATE (1947)
Walt Radak, ravenous gangster
From the moment Mann and cinematographer George Diskant
captured his large, stony eyes in the swinging lamp of a dark hideout, Burr’s film identity for the next decade was assured. Burr’s Radak is a fairly typical tough of the period, plotting against Steve
Randall (Steve Brodie) to avenge his brother Al being captured in an
botched warehouse robbery, convicted, and sent to death row.
Burr hadn’t yet perfected his menace in his initial
noir, but he was still highly effective out of the gate.
First, there’s the swinging lamp scene, an early yet definitive noir sequence. Then, when he waves a broken
bottle in front of Steve and threatens to cut up his wife’s
face, he delivers his lines with the convincingly cold
In his first noir, Burr leads a Desperate gang
60
NOIR CITY I SPRING 2011 I www.filmnoirfoundation.org
whimsy of a ruthless killer.
Later he terrorizes the wife’s elderly aunt and uncle by using a
large knife from a farmhouse table to cut and eat pieces of a turkey
as he demands information. It’s a wonderful little touch that shows
Burr’s knack for giving villainy an extra dimension.
Radak decides he’s going to kill Steve at the very moment his own
brother is executed, and he orders a henchmen to prepare his captive a last meal. Steve won’t eat, so Burr grabs his glass of milk and
slowly drinks it, holding a gun on Steve and watching the seconds
tick away on a clock. More nice garnish to an otherwise perfunctory
hostage scene.
The final stairwell shootout is another shocking moment in Burr’s
noir debut, the first of his many dynamic onscreen deaths. Plugged
in the chest, Radak tumbles over a bannister, falling several flights to
a grisly death. But it wasn’t really a death at all—for Burr, it was the
birth of a whole collection of bad guys.
The actor’s heaviest role, as Rick Coyle in Raw Deal
RAW DEAL (1948)
Rick Coyle, pyromaniacal hoodlum
A year after appearing in Desperate, Burr would again be teamed
with director Anthony Mann (with cinematographer John Alton
replacing Diskant) for this noir classic, the one that forever forged
Burr’s greatness for embodying pure villainy.
Rick Coyle is one of Burr’s signature characters, a ruthless, hulking gangster with a fatal fascination with fire. He’s rotten enough
to have set up the double-cross that lands his cohort Joe Sullivan
(Dennis O’Keefe) in prison, but when Sullivan escapes from the joint,
Coyle puts out a contract on him. But that’s only one aspect of his
dastardly persona.
What distinguishes Coyle is his penchant for pyromania, whether
it’s lighting matches and holding the flicker under a cohort’s ear or
throwing flaming cherries jubilee onto a tipsy dame who accidentally
bumps him in a nightclub. The latter is one of the most shocking and
violent scenes in noir, and Burr plays up the fire angle to the hilt, showing absolutely no remorse as he listens to the scalded woman shriek.
As the vengeful O’Keefe closes in on him, Burr adds yet another
dimension to Coyle—a surprising spinelessness under the seemingly
ruthless, psychotic exterior. Of course, he meets his fate in a predictable way, but Coyle has set the stage for it with all that’s come
before. Raw Deal has many facets that make it one of the greatest
examples of film noir, but Burr’s brew of unstable brutality, tinged
with a craven cowardice at the climax, is one of the main reasons the
film is an undisputed classic.
PITFALL (1948)
J. B. McDonald, loathsome Lothario
In Andre De Toth’s taut, compelling look at mid-life crisis and
suburban malaise, Burr is cast in one of his meatiest scumball roles.
Private eye J.B. McDonald—or Mac, as everyone calls him—is a former cop bounced from the force, now performing scurrilous freelance investigations for insurance executive and bored suburbanite
John Forbes (Dick Powell).
While delivering to Forbes some incriminating evidence in an embezzlement case, Mac reveals that he’s become obsessed with the girlfriend of Bill Smiley, the man serving time for the crime. Forbes takes
over the case from the brooding PI, but Mac won’t be dismissed that
easily, particularly after Forbes himself falls under the seductive spell
of Smiley’s girl, Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott).
Burr plays Mac as a breathy, oily creep who sports tacky ties and
exudes overconfidence, both in his abilities as an investigator and as a
lover. Despite Mona’s protests, Mac stalks her everywhere, and when
he realizes Forbes is moving in on her, he beats his employer to a bloody
pulp. Mac keeps stalking Mona, trying to force a relationship, even going to the dress shop where she works and ordering her to model for him.
Forbes intercedes on Mona’s behalf, getting the jump on Mac and
beating him to a pulp. Trying to kill off two rivals with one stone,
and perhaps land Mona in the bargain, Mac visits Smiley in prison
only days before his parole and tips him to Forbes’s liaison with
Mona, setting up a climactic confrontation between the two men.
Believing that his ploy has worked, Mac shows up at Mona’s apartment to elope with her, claiming that she’ll “get used to me in time.”
As he blissfully packs her clothes, Mona pulls a gun from a drawer
and shoots him.
Burr gets plenty of room to stretch out in this role (he’s given
almost as much screen time as Powell and Scott) and he responds by
creating his strongest, albeit most repulsive, portrayal. With Rick
Coyle already under his belt that same year, he quickly became the
go-to creep of choice in Hollywood’s rising tide of dark crime films.
ABANDONED (1949)
Kerric, baby-market racketeer
In addition to Raw Deal, Burr made a few other films with Dennis O’Keefe, including this intriguing little oddity in which he once
again plays a seedy private dick who has become part of an illegal
baby brokerage.
As the unscrupulous, self-serving Kerric, Burr runs interference
for the outfit, but when reporter Mark Sitko (O’Keefe) helps naïve
Midwesterner Paula Considine (Gale Storm) search for her missing
sister and baby, Kerric gets cold feet about the operation, especially
as O’Keefe gets closer to the truth. Kerric double-crosses his boss,
matronly Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau), by kidnapping the baby
of Paula’s dead sister from its adoptive parents and extorting $1,500
in the process.
Mrs. Donner and her henchmen (led by the brutish Mike Mazurki) are on to Kerric, however, and he’s taken back to the their hideout
to be tortured. In what might have been a nod to Burr’s role in Raw
Deal, he is burned with a book of matches by sadistic hood Little
www.filmnoirfoundation.org I SPRING 2011 I NOIR CITY
61
Burr brokers black-market babies in Abandoned, also starring Gale Storm
Guy DeCola (Will Kuluva), then in a desperate struggle to break free,
gets his neck snapped by Mazurki.
Burr is very strong throughout, playing both sides against the
middle in an effort to save himself. O’Keefe’s reporter colorfully
sums up Burr’s character in their first confrontation, as Kerric claims
he’s taken on a legitimate missing person’s case: “Kerric, you going
legitimate is like a vulture going vegetarian.” Undoubtedly a line
from dialogue consultant William Bowers, this definitely defines
Burr’s character in this unusual but superior role.
UNMASKED (1950)
Roger Lewis, murderous publisher
Good luck tracking down this hard-to-find Republic cheapie, but
it’s worth the search if only for the fact that Burr received a rare leading role (still as a heavy) sharing top billing with three other actors
now largely forgotten.
And, oh boy, is Burr unsavory here, playing the editor and publisher of The Periscope, a scandal sheet that’s financed through loans
from the wife (Hillary Brooke) of an showbiz tycoon with whom
Lewis is having an affair. Even though he is only consorting with
the woman for her money—he’s in love with his own secretary—he
agrees to an afternoon rendezvous at her suite because she has some
promissory notes for him to sign. But when he arrives at her apart-
62
NOIR CITY I SPRING 2011 I www.filmnoirfoundation.org
ment building, he encounters his lover’s departing husband, Harry
Jackson (Paul Harvey), who has learned of the illicit relationship and
just had it out with his wife.
Lewis seizes the opportunity: he sneaks into the apartment, strangles his lover, burns the promissory notes, and concocts a scheme in
which her husband will be blamed for the murder. Jackson goes on
the lam, and Lewis goes to extreme lengths to track him down and
have him executed. When Jackson’s daughter arrives in town to get
to the bottom of what happened, she ultimately “unmasks” Burr’s
character as the real murderer.
The film is a fairly weak entry in the noir canon, but with Burr
relishing such a large and loathsome role, it certainly has its moments.
THE WHIP HAND (1951)
Steve Loomis, calculating communist
This may be the kookiest film noir to ever come out of Hollywood. A big-city magazine writer is on a fishing holiday in the wilds
of Minnesota when he stumbles upon a nest of commies utilizing
old Nazi scientists to conduct bizarre germ-warfare experiments on
humans.
The movie is a total hoot (as it probably was even during the
height of the Red Scare), mainly because it features one of Burr’s
The climax plays out in an empty baseball park (LA’s long-gone Wrigley Field) and Nick finally gets his payoff … in lead.
While the movie has issues—Sinatra plays Wilson as a rather unlikeable punk—Burr gives a formidable performance, although he isn’t
on screen nearly enough. It moves to our “A” list just for the scene in
which he pistol-whips Ol’ Blue Eyes and uses his necktie as a noose.
HIS KIND OF WOMAN (1951)
Mitchum gets a working over from Burr in His Kind of Woman
most memorable baddies. He’s the commie ringleader who also
serves as the experimental lab’s first line of defense. The beauty of
the role is that Burr doubles as a cackling country bumpkin in charge
of the backwoods lodge.
While everyone else at the lodge looks wholly suspicious, Burr’s
corpulent Steve plays the convincing hick in the presence of writer
Matt Corbin (Elliott Reed). He grins and cackles as he tries to persuade the writer to try his luck elsewhere, as all the fish in the lake
have mysteriously died. When Corbin decides that the lodge’s history
might make an interesting story, the familiar Burr is revealed—the
sinister, sneering henchman who drops his cornball shtick to eliminate Corbin.
What’s remarkable about Burr’s performance is that he switches
from the jocular innkeeper to the cold, calculating Red on numerous occasions, and his chameleon-like quick changes
are mesmerizing, despite the inanity of the story and
script. It’s no doubt a film Burr would want us to forget, but he’s masterful in it; a performance to good to
be forgotten.
Nick Ferraro, sociopathic crime boss
Burr had to have serious stature as a character actor to pummel Dick Powell in Pitfall and manhandle Frank Sinatra in Meet
Danny Wilson. But he really pulled out all the stops in this strange,
overlong, and confounding Howard Hughes production: he not only
knees Robert Mitchum in the groin, he slams the star’s head into a
wall not once, but twice.
After cooling his heels in Italy for four years following deportation, gambling kingpin Ferraro is ready to return to the US, through a
Mexican resort, by assuming the identity of Dan Milner (Mitchum),
who is promised $50,000 to hang out at the resort, not suspecting
why he’s been summoned there.
Long story short—and it’s a long, laborious story—once Milner
wises up to what’s happening and hot-headed Ferraro believes he’s
backing out on the deal, the two men confront each other in a protracted climax on Ferraro’s yacht. Burr plays it ultra-intense, spitting
vitriolic dialogue, bulging out his piercing eyes in virtually every scene.
He presides over Milner’s brutal beating, attempts to inject him with a
debilitating drug, and finally has a shootout with Mitchum.
Naturally, Burr’s Nick Ferraro gets it in the end, but not before a
searing performance in which he pretty much steals the film from an
impressive ensemble. While all the cast members have their moments
in this bizarre noir gumbo, Burr’s are the most riveting, because he
brings focus and intensity to an otherwise meandering script that’s
short on action. He saves the movie in the process.
MEET DANNY WILSON (1951)
Nick Driscoll, shyster racketeer
This Joe Pevney-directed film doesn’t quite know what
it wants to be–a musical, buddy picture, comedy, or drama. But when Burr is on screen, it shifts solidly into noir
mode. Nightclub operator Nick Driscoll is a slick, humorless opportunist who gives a break to aspiring singer Danny Wilson (Frank Sinatra) and his piano-playing partnerbodyguard Mike Ryan (Alex Nicol). But there’s a catch—
Driscoll gets 50 percent of their earnings, even if they make
it big. Broke and without prospects, they agree.
Trouble brews right away, as Burr becomes part of a
love quadrangle: Both Danny and Nick have designs on
Joy Carroll (Shelley Winters) who has her sights on Big
Mike. When Danny and Mike become a smashing success, they want out of their arrangement with Driscoll,
who soon comes calling for his whopping $267,000 cut.
“Sue me, chiseler,” taunts Danny. Nick smoothly pulls
a gun from his suitcoat and replies, “Meet my lawyer.” Getting in shape by smacking around Audrey Totter in FBI Girl
www.filmnoirfoundation.org I SPRING 2011 I NOIR CITY
63
As sleazy Harry Prebble, Burr tried to date-rape Anne Baxter in The Blue Gardenia
FBI GIRL (1951)
Blake, suave political fixer
And now for something completely different: a low-budget Robert Lippert-produced flag-waver that might be aptly framed as Perry
Mason in an alternate universe. Burr plays a suave, shrewd, articulate sharp dresser who uses a cigarette holder and never loses his
cool. But instead of an indomitable defense attorney he’s a backroom lobbyist, the power behind a corrupt governor hiding a murderous past.
Blake has a plan to erase evidence implicating venerable Gov.
Owen Grisby of a murder he committed under a former name, John
Williams, so he can push him toward possible senate and White
House runs. He engineers a scheme to have Williams’ fingerprint
card lifted from FBI files, and the reluctant but desperate governor
plays along.
A first attempt goes awry when Blake’s agency insider, a female
clerk, has to be killed after she gets cold feet. Blake tries again, enlisting fellow lobbyist Carl Chercourt (Tom Drake) to get his girlfriend
Shirley (Audrey Totter), who also works in the FBI file office, to steal
the card.
Totter’s got a stronger moral code, though, and she goes straight
64
NOIR CITY I SPRING 2011 I www.filmnoirfoundation.org
to federal agents played by Cesar Romero and George Brent, who set
up a phony transfer of the fingerprint card and film Blake showing
up at her apartment to retrieve it. Blake is too smart not to check
the file against the governor’s prints, and he quickly realizes it’s a
phony. Burr finally flips into thug mode, tracks down Totter, slaps
her around, and orders her to get the real card or else. The film
quickly devolves into routine cops-and-robbers shootout stuff.
It’s the first three-quarters of the film where Burr struts his stuff
as a white-collar criminal mastermind, quite different from most of
the crooks he played. It’s well worth a look just for his performance,
a glimpse of Perry Mason operating on the other side of the law.
THE BLUE GARDENIA (1953)
Harry Prebble, date rapist
Burr’s performance here could be described as villainy-light, but
it’s no less impressive in an otherwise so-so film. Prebble isn’t such
a nasty guy, and even his character name suggests that he’s not patently evil. He’s simply a skirt-hound that can be found in virtually
every white-collar setting, a charming rogue and an ad agency artist
who lures women from the switchboard pool to his man-cave by
drawing their portraits.
Burr’s most famous, and quietest, villain: Lars Thorwald
He seems to have the perfect prey in Anne Baxter, who has received a Dear John letter from her soldier beau. She sits alone in her
apartment most nights, crushed, but Prebble catches her by phone
at just the right rebounding moment. Enticing her to a restaurant,
he fills her full of booze before taking her back to his bachelor pad.
Once he senses she’s sloshed and defenseless, he makes his move. But
Baxter comes to her senses as she’s being “Prebbled,” grabs a fireplace iron, and conks him. She runs from the apartment.
Of course, Prebble is found dead. Baxter thinks she’s the murderer, and the movie plays out with newspaper columnist Richard
Conte ferreting out what really happened. The audience gets tipped
off to the real culprit when Prebble gets a call from a mousey little
thing whom he clearly has knocked up. She’s “in trouble,” she says.
It’s during this call that Burr demonstrates his deftness, instantly
transforming from charming wolf to insensitive beast as he tells the
woman it’s her problem and not to call him anymore. Great stuff
from a man who’d hit his dark stride.
REAR WINDOW (1954)
Lars Thorwald, uxoricidal loser
It can be debated whether Hitchcock’s masterpiece of voyeurism
qualifies as film noir, but there is little doubt Rear Window has numerous noir elements. And if you’re compiling any kind of list of
Burr’s greatest villains, Lars has to be on it.
The brilliance of Burr’s performance is that he manages, silently,
to conjure up sympathy for a man who has cut up his wife and distributed her body parts all across town. He doesn’t seem to be such a
horrible guy; he’s just a man at the end of his emotional rope—broke,
stuck in a noisy apartment complex with a bedridden, shrewish
woman. His wardrobe—rumpled coat, frumpy white hat—suggests
he’s a beaten-down soul as opposed to some calculating killer. And
then there’s his gait. It’s subtle, but Burr’s trudge tells you everything
you need to know about this reluctant murderer.
Even after he does the deed and discovers that Stewart and Grace
Kelly are on to his crime, he remains in character. When he comes
to Stewart’s apartment (listen for the trudge), he confronts his neighbor by asking, “What do you want from me? Do you want money?
I don’t have any money.” His menace is in his bewilderment, his
simpleton clumsiness, and his desperation.
Obviously Burr was following the script, but he extracts every last
bloody drop of character intention. It’s a landmark performance, delivered almost completely without dialogue. Amazingly, Burr wasn’t
nominated for an Academy Award. On the Waterfront players swallowed up three of the five supporting actor nominations that year,
and Edmond O’Brien won for The Barefoot Contessa. Go figure.
A CRY IN THE NIGHT (1956)
Harold Loftus, psychotic kidnapper
In one of his final feature film roles before taking on Perry Mason,
Burr portrayed a demented simpleton named Harold Loftus, who
totes a lunch-pail and hides in the bushes of Lovers’ Lane spying on
couples in their cars. He’s spotted by Owen Clark (Richard Anderson), who confronts Harold while his date, Elizabeth (played by an
18-year-old Natalie Wood), waits in the car.
Harold knocks Clark unconscious with his lunchbox, hops in the
car, and kidnaps the girl, taking her to his ramshackle hideout in an
abandoned brickyard. There, he tells her horror stories of his controlling mother (shades of Psycho four years later) and how she ruined
his life. He tries to reassure the terrified girl with gifts of sequined
gowns and apricot pie, while her hot-headed police chief father
As a sympathetic heavy, holding Natalie Wood hostage
www.filmnoirfoundation.org I SPRING 2011 I NOIR CITY
65
They Were So Young (1954)—white slave trader, young girl division
Affair in Havana (1957)—bitter, jealous para
plegic with blond (!!) hair
Burr also played rare cop roles in noirs such
as Sleep, My Love (1948) and Crime of Passion
(1957), in which he has a tawdry affair with Barbara Stanwyck. His standout performance in A
Place in the Sun (1951), as penetrating prosecutor
R. Frank Marlowe, demonstrated that he could
play the other side of the bench as well, and he
is particularly fine as a spineless attorney in the
excellent noir western Station West (1948), where
he’s reunited, ever so briefly, with Dick Powell.
Somehow, Burr even managed to weave in a
few small-screen baddies, including a memorable
performance in a 1956 Ford Television Theater
production alongside Joseph Cotten called “Man
Without A Fear.’’ Burr plays a prison escapee who
is out to murder Cotten, who double-crossed him,
only to learn that Cotten is dying of a fatal illness
and welcomes the killing.
When Perry Mason came along in 1957, the
heaviness was over. Burr not only was done with
bad guys, he was done with the big screen. He
appeared in only a handful of feature films during
the next 35 years, until his death in 1993. None of
the roles were even close to film noir.
But between 1947 and 1957, Burr created
an impossibly rich cornucopia of criminals and
creeps, each one with a different twist to make the
roles distinctive and unforgettable. Even though
he rarely played a lead, Burr was a significant figure in film noir genre: the seminal bad guy. While
such a nefarious legacy may be out of place in
the bucolic wine country of Sonoma, it surely deserves a wall of its own somewhere, and a large
one at that. ■
•
•
Burr cuckolded Hayden with Stanwyck in Crime of Passion ...
(Edmond O’Brien) orchestrates a frantic manhunt. Burr’s pathetic
feeb is done-in by his own mother, who calls the police to report her
overgrown son missing.
A Cry In The Dark is a pretty shabby film, somewhat redeemed
by Burr’s portrayal of a man held psychological prisoner by an overbearing parent. It was a curious choice of parts for an actor soon to
be one of America’s most familiar and popular faces, and another
striking example of his acting range.
The above films would constitute a hefty career for any character
actor operating almost exclusively on the wrong side of the law. But
Burr is eminently watchable in a number of other films that at are
either wholly film noir or on its fringes. Here are some more selections from what seems to be an endless array:
• Walk A Crooked Mile (1948)—a Lenin look-a-like Commie
• Red Light (1949)—yet another Nick, this one a particularly
nasty thug
• Borderline (1950)—drug smuggler
• M (1951)—Pottsy, “king of the pickpockets”
66
NOIR CITY I SPRING 2011 I www.filmnoirfoundation.org
... and interrogated Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun