Some people you just know backwards. You know the last of them first and then, like a detective, you work backwards to piece together the life they lived, the life you missed. Such is the case for me with Lloyd Nolan.

Growing up, I knew the San Francisco-born actor as Dianne Carroll's crusty but benign boss on the NBC series Julia, from the disturbing 1973 TV movie Isn’t It Shocking? (a geriatric murder mystery also featuring Edmund O’Brien, Will Geer and Ruth Gordon) and from various disaster movies – Airport (1969), Earthquake (1974), Fire! (1977) and Flight to Holocaust (1977) – in which he seemed to play the same engineer called in to help the heroes sort things out. He seemed ancient to me. On Julia, he was pushing 70, white haired, turkey necked. His voice quavered a bit. Back then, I hadn’t the slightest suspicion of how cool I’d find this actor twenty years after his death.

I’ve been brushing up on my Lloyd Nolan lately, after a chance viewing of a few minutes of Johnny Apollo (1940) on American Movie Classics. Nolan would have been 38 then. I only saw a couple of scenes but his performance was a revelation. Loose-limbed and amiable as gangster Mickey Dwyer, Nolan steals the show from the combined forces of Tyrone Power, Dorothy Lamour and Marc Lawrence (cast as a minor gunsel – go figure). Looking sharp in a black suit and keeping up a breathless line of patter, Nolan blithely uses a meat cleaver¹ to hack the lock off of the icebox door to get a piece of steak for Power’s black eye. It’s a brilliant bit of business and all at once I felt a sense of mourning for an actor who has been dead since 1985. In that moment, Nolan’s last performance, as Mia Farrow’s actor father in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), became doubly poignant (his unsteady but heartfelt rendition of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”) and triply funny (“Two drinks and she turns into Joan Collins” – I’m quoting from memory.)

New out as a deluxe DVD box set from 20th Century Fox are some of the Michael Shayne mysteries Nolan did for the studio starting in 1940. On the side of law and order this time (as long as there’s a profit in it), Mike Shayne is a good fit for the actor. Michael Shayne, Private Detective (1940) is a fine introduction to the character (a helluva departure from the gumshoe as-written by Brett Halliday) but not the most satisfying as far as whodunits go. The series got better as it went along, with the fifth entry, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die (1942), being a highpoint: Nolan enters this singing an Irish ditty and involving himself in some haunted house shenanigans in the company of Owin Howland and a very young Jeff Corey. Not part of this box set is Dressed to Kill (1941 – not to be confused with the 1946 Sherlock Holmes mystery or 1980 Brian DePalma transvestite slasher film of the same name), a fun backstage whodunit with William Demerest, Henry Daniel and Mantan Moreland along for the bumpy ride.  The fourth entry in Warners Mike Shayne series is for some reason available as a  no-frills single disc from 20^th Century Fox.

Also out on DVD is Nolan’s cinema debut, in “G” Men (1935), with James Cagney and Robert Armstrong. Nolan plays Hugh Farrell, an FBI agent so good natured and friendly that you just know he’s doomed. Still, he makes the most of his early scenes, teaching Cagney ju-jitsu and taking a team to capture dapper gangster Edward Pawley, whose bowler hat conceals a .45 snub-nosed. Nolan goes down in a hail of gunfire in a scene patterned after the Kansas City Massacre and his presence is missed through the rest of the movie, as intended.²

My investigation of Lloyd Nolan has scarcely begun and you can bet I’ll be reporting back. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. While Johnny Apollo remains criminally unavailable on DVD at this time a number of Nolan’s 1940s crime pictures are on the market: The House on 92^nd Street (1945), Somewhere in the Night (1946), Lady in the Lake (1947), The Street With No Name (1948) and The Girl Hunters (1966), with Mickey Spillaine as Mike Hammer. I’m also looking forward to Bataan (1943), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951) and Island in the Sky (1953).

I’ve got my work cut out for me but I’m up to the job.

Notes:

1. Nolan would be replaced as Mike Shayne when the series shifted to PRC by Hugh Beaumont, whose claim to fame is playing Leave It to Beaver’s Ward Cleaver. A coincidence?
2. An early scene in Michael Shayne, Private Detective copies the opening of "G" Men by having Mike punch a shady client straight out the door of his office into the hallway, as Cagney's Brick Davis had done in the earlier film.