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It’s fun to find a new old actor to get excited about and these days John Wray is my jam.
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Mind you, I’m not just finding out about him — he’s been on my radar for nearly 20 years, ever since I saw Michael Curtiz’ DOCTOR X (1932), in which he plays one of the scientist red herrings in a (cannibal) murder mystery set against the world of medical research and presided over by Lionel Atwill as the eponymous medico. I’d seen Wray in things over the years as well, as one of Paul Muni’s fellow convicts in I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932), as a farmer in MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN (1936), as a San Francisco wharf rat who tries to Shanghai James Cagney in THE FRISCO KID (1936) … and yet it wasn’t until this past month that it all came together for me.
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In Edwin L. Marin’s THE DEATH KISS (1933), shot by the upwardly mobile Poverty Row outfit Tiffany Studios, Wray plays Detective Sheehan, an LA homicide dick on the trail of a killer whose patch is a Hollywood studio. Wray is fourth-billed, after leading man and lady David Manners and Adrienne Ames (playing, respectively, a fledgling screenwriter and a movie star) and Bela Lugosi, who turns in a cameo performance as the reddest of herrings, an Eddie Mannix-like studio manager whom we suspect of the murder because… well, because he’s Bela Lugosi. With Lugosi there to add a menacing quality to the script, Wray is presented in stark contrast as a no nonsense Irish copper, there to talk out of the corner of his mouth and suffer the amateur sleuthing of Manners… who invariably turns out to be right. Detective Sheehan is a throwaway part given just the right English by Wray, who tends to dominate all the scenes he is in (to my eye, anyway) just because he makes it all look so easy.
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While watching John Wray in THE DEATH KISS (I was obliged to watch it multiple times for professional purposes), I experienced one of those “Where have you been all my life?” moments… but of course he’s always been there. Can you pick him out of this shot from I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG? I can. John Wray is one of those actors whose entire personality can be altered in an instant just by putting on a hat, and he wore some great ones in his film career, which lasted only a tick over a decade. But he had been a stage performer before that and he was even, believe it or leave it, once put forward as a replacement for the dying Lon Chaney in Tod Browning’s proposed big screen adaptation of DRACULA (1931).
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This announcement appeared in VARIETY in June of 1930, two months before Lon Chaney was even in his grave. A lot of actors had their names thrown around for the role that eventually went to Bela Lugosi — Conrad Veidt, Paul Muni, Chester Morris, Joseph Schildkraut, and stage actors William Courtenay and Ian Keith. Mind you, an actor having his name announced as being in the hat to play Dracula didn’t necessarily mean that Universal was actually interested in that actor and could have been everything to do with overzealous management or even a bit of preemptive speculation on the part of the trade paper in question. (HOLLYWOOD FILMOGRAPH favored Ian Keith.) If you know Wray’s early work and the kinds of characters he tended to play then you will share, as I do, the skepticism of genre expert David J. Skal (from whose book, HOLLYWOOD GOTHIC: THE TANGLED WEB OF DRACULA, FROM NOVEL TO STAGE TO SCREEN I borrowed the above image) over the prospect of John Wray in the role of Count Dracula.
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Born in Philadelphia in 1887 and breaking into Broadway in his late 20s as a Shakespearean actor in revivals of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (as Launcelot Gobbo) and HAMLET (as the Second Player), Wray continued on the Great White Way for another decade, playing towards the end of his Broadway tenure an excess of gangsters (as in BROADWAY in 1926 and TIN PAN ALLEY in 1928). At some point, he got ambitious and turned his hand to writing and producing, penning the melodrama NIGHTSTICK and backing the show himself, along with future film director Elliot Nugent and Nugent’s father, but the play — in which Wray plays a cop killer — was not a success; his follow-up, the farce SO WAS NAPOLEON (SAP FROM SYRACUSE) was another bust, closing after 25 performances. It was his gangster parts that brought Wray to the attention of Hollywood, where he recreated the role of mobster Joe Privadi in Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation of TIN PAN ALLEY, titled NEW YORK NIGHTS (1929, above).
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Milestone tapped the fortyish actor again for ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, in which he played Old Himmelstoss, the nebbisher postman of a provincial German village who undergoes a drastic personality change when his reserve company is called to active duty in World War I. It was a dynamic and different role for Wray, and he played it to the hilt. ALL QUIET was a success for Universal Pictures, a double Academy Award winner (Best Picture, Best Director), and no doubt a big career boost for Wray… but Dracula?
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I don’t buy it. I firmly believe that Carl Laemmle, Jr. would have cast a cat as Count Dracula if he thought the public would go for it but movie producers and studio heads are percentage players. They would have had to believe the public would accept John Wray as Dracula to make him “the neck-biter” and by the summer of 1930 his film roles had consisted of a gangster and a Kraut. Both firmly rooted in middle-age. Though he occasionally sported a toupee, Wray was balding and his characters always had a weak, defeated, or at least lived-in aspect to them that just isn’t the stuff of the immortal. I am inclined to believe that Wray and his agent or manager were trying to goose Universal into considering him for the part and that they planted that news item in VARIETY. Wray was not above politicking within the world of make-believe. Back when the hit play BROADWAY was being prepared for a transfer from the Broadhurst Theatre to London’s West End and the producers were sold on hiring star Lee Tracy’s stand-in to take the lead of the London production, Wray (who played the part of gangster “Scar” Edwards) persuaded producer Crosby Gaige to persuade director Jed Harris to have that actor dropped. The actor’s name? James Cagney. A well-established dancer-actor, Cagney had actually been playwrights Philip Dunning and George Abbott’s first choice to play song-and-dance man Roy Lane but Harris had gone with Tracy (who could act up a storm but couldn’t sing or dance worth a damn). Cagney had wound up Tracy’s understudy and the personal favorite of the rest of the cast and crew, who knew he deserved the part and were happy he was chosen to play the part in London… until Wray threw a monkey wrench into the works. Why Wray did this is not known, though it is easy to imagine he might have felt intimidated or upstaged by the dynamicic younger performer, who certainly did rebound from the disappointment to become an estimable Hollywood star by 1931 as THE PUBLIC ENEMY.
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There’s a karmic circularity in the history that Wray, his grand schemes unrealized and his personal ambitions unfulfilled, wound up as a jobbing actor reporting to work at Warner Brothers, where James Cagney was a big, big star. Wray doesn’t even receive billing for his bid as “The Weasel” in FRISCO KID (1936), as a lowlife thug who attempts to do Cagney’s ex-sailor a bad turn on the Barbary Coast. Cagney had by this point no idea that Wray had done him wrong back on Broadway but he did know by the time Wray had wrangled himself another role in a Cagney film, EACH DAWN I DIE (1938). Cast as a merciless penitentiary turnkey who makes life miserable for convicts Cagney and George Raft, Wray chews the scenery from stem to stern, speaking most of his lines through clenched teeth, until the tables are turned on him by the very inmates under his thumb and he winds up on the business end of a baling hook.
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Cagney would have been in an excellent position to pay Wray back for his treachery. In his excellent biography of Cagney, author John McCabe retells the tale courtesy of character actor Ben Welden, who had been involved in both New York and London productions of Broadway:
“Well, Jim encountered him — the man responsible for Jim’s heartbreaking loss — and what did Jim do? He treated him as he did every other actor — with courtesy and no ill will at all. Just another proof to me that Jim Cagney was what he always was: a very great gentleman.”
Maybe Cagney found it cathartic, seeing Wray’s character torn apart by convicts in what remains a very disturbing scene. As for Wray, he had less than two years to live, into which he was able to squeeze a dozen more film appearances. He turns up in a bit as a chaingang overseer in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) and in old friend Elliot Nugent’s 1939 remake of THE CAT AND THE CANARY…
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… he plays the asylum guard who informs the protagonists that there is a maniac on the loose, helping to set the stage for a great evening of thrills, chills, and belly laughs courtesy of lead Bob Hope. After playing a bit role (uncredited) as another farmer in Columbia’s THE DOCTOR TAKES A WIFE (1940), John Wray died. He was only 53 years old — the age I turn this year. I know nothing of the details of his death and I will move from this place in a concerted effort to see more of his movies and learn more about him. High on my Must-See List is POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL (1936), in which he terrorizes Shirley Temple, and THE MIRACLE MAN (1931), a remake, interestingly enough, of WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1928), with Wray in the part played originally by Lon Chaney. If any of this appeals to you, please do check out John Wray as the cop on the case in THE DEATH KISS, when it streets as an exclusive DVD and Blu-ray from Kino Lorber later this year.