Who Are Those Guys #2
September 20, 2010
Okay, let’s make this a regular feature.
Does anybody recognize these two uncredited character actors? The frame grabs are from “Big Jake,” a 1961 episode of The Barbara Stanwyck Show (and an unsold pilot for a semi-comedic cop show starring Andy Devine).
Paul Bryar is on the right. Who’s the fellow on the left?
And how about this guy?
As always, leave me the answers in the comments!
The Classic TV History Blog 
September 20, 2010 at 10:31 pm
I don’t know any of the three guys. But how about a few lines about Frank Lovejoy? He was in a lot of crummy, mediocre Universal and Warners movies in the fifties. He seems to have disappeared by around 1960. To me his great triumph was a show called Meet McGraw. For years afterward I found myself humming the theme song from the show which was used incessantly. Recently I acquired some episodes from an internet bootlegger. Discovered the theme song was actually an incomplete fragment of One For My Baby, a song I became acquainted with years later, but could never connect to the song fragment I heard on Meet McGraw. Do you supposed the composers gave the show a copyright deal on the song because they only used a third of the hook?
September 22, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Bottom photo is Lennie Bremen. It looks like he’s playing a cabbie in that shot. He also played a lot of truck drivers, construction workers, and gangsters, both in comedies and dramas. I’m not sure about the guy will Paul Bryar. It looks a little like Richard Devon, but Devon would have been billed at this time in his career. I’ll have to study the photo some more… hope this helps… I’m enjoying this feature !
September 23, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Lennie Bremen … that sounds right. Yeah, that’s not Devon, but this guy has the same swarthy look. It’s like a game of Concentration … eventually, these guys show up credited somewhere else, and I just have to think back to ID them in some show where they weren’t credited.
John, you’re great at this … I will have to keep doing these!
September 24, 2010 at 8:01 am
The one on the left looks a little like Arthur Batanides.
September 24, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Another good guess — he DOES look like Arthur Batanides, but it’s not him. (Trust me, if you see the show, you’ll know.) I’m not certain, but I’m guessing this guy didn’t work much past the early 60s.
September 26, 2010 at 10:13 am
How about that Bing Crosby film of the 1960 World Serious Last Game, shot off a TV screen at his home in Hillsboro, while he was in Paris? What surprises me is that it didn’t have time bars in it. I’ll have to read a piece about it. A lot of the great old stuff done live between 1948 and 1960, on TV, was simply destroyed, or, after the advent of videotape from ampex in 1957, recorded over. Most of Jack Paar’s and Steve Allan’s Tonight Shows were lost by being destroyed. Paar managed to keep some of them himself by having an engineer make kinescopes of them by filming directly off the studio monitors. That’s how Jackie Gleason was able to keep a complete set of the Honeymooners, but not all of his variety shows, which he thought less of, so didn’t keep.. Did you know that George C. Scott played the lead in a live version of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset in 1957. NBC kept a videotape of it for awhile, but eventually reused the video to tape Carson’s show. Since there have been something like 200 or more network affiliates, many of them with kinescope equipment going all the way back to 1948, there’s still a chance that a lot of this stuff has been preserved, just not unearthed from the attics where it presently resides. There have to be some very rich folks with the money, like Bing, to buy film equipment for home use, that filmed stuff right off TV back then. There is a time difference between film and video that produces a hum bar when you look at a film made of live or even recorded television. There are software and electronic ways to eliminate that hum bar now that weren’t around a long time ago. So even a tape filled with hum bars can be fixed. I’d like to see George C. Scott in Winterset.
September 26, 2010 at 10:26 am
“World Series” … let’s see, that’s basketball, right?
September 26, 2010 at 4:07 pm
“’World Series’ … let’s see, that’s basketball, right?”
Not sure, I’ll have to give the matter some further study!
September 26, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Re: Hum Bars. Bing’s copy doesn’t have hum bars because the article states he had the kinescope made by a company that performed that kind of service and would have had the correct equipment. Networks and professional kinescope organizations used specialized equipment (modified shutters, 30-minute film magazines etc.)to accomodate the differences between 30fps television images vs. film’s 24 fps.
February 8, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Sorry, it took some time to locate a name, but it really looks like Michael Pate. My Mom and I were watching Return of the Gunfighter 1967 with Robert Taylor. Michael Pate was born Edward John Pate in Drummoyne,Sydney. You can find more info on him on “Wikipedia” Active years were 1940-1996. I hope this helps. I do like this feature as my Mom and I like the classic movies of days gone by. :-)