Even a casual movie watcher probably knows who Edmund Gwenn is – if not by name, then by the film MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (1948) in which he played a department store Santa Claus who turns out to be the real thing. He won a Best Supporting Oscar for that performance, and, as a kid, it was a favorite holiday film until that black day when we discovered Kris Kringel was a Pagan myth. Gwenn, of course, had a long and impressive career that began in the silent era, continued through the peak years of the studio system and wound down gently during the rising popularity of television.

Along with Charles Coburn, who boasts a similarly impressive film career (and it began at age fifty six!), Gwenn is one of my favorite character actors and one who occasionally commanded the main role or top tier billing (he snagged a third place poster credit for the Victor Mature-Patricia Neal environmental comedy, SOMETHING FOR THE BIRDS, a still from it is featured above). Often cast as beyond-middle-aged men who were genial, resourceful and trustworthy, Gwenn could turn on a dime and be the complete reverse. And what I liked best about him was that mischievous twinkle he always had in his eye, even in villainous roles, and the way he projected intelligence on the screen. Even in comedies where he might have been the brunt of a joke, he was no fool.

Until this week I had never seen Gwenn in anything from the early sound era or before and then I watched him in Alfred Hitchcock’s THE SKIN GAME (1931), recreating the same role he played in the 1921 silent film version of it. It is one of the few films that Hitchcock dismissed outright throughout his career, stating he never wanted to make it and that it was merely a studio assignment. Most of his biographers have devoted little ink to it as well and it barely rates two paragraphs in Donald Spoto’s book, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. He refers to it as a “social diatribe” and writes, “Endlessly talky, it reveals a Hitchcock detached from his project.”

I’m not going to make any claims for it being one of Hitchcock’s neglected masterpieces but I have to say I enjoyed THE SKIN GAME enormously due to Gwenn’s piss-and-vinegar performance as a nouveau riche landowner who clashes with his aristocratic old money neighbors in the country. Appropriately named Mr. Hornblower, Gwenn is a loud, arrogant self-made businessman who steamrolls over everyone to get his way. He’s the sort of developer who is still operating today, mowing down green space to build polluting factories with no concern for the environment, adjacent properties or any aesthetic objections. Money and the power that goes with it seems to fill him with a vicious delight that compensates for the snobby treatment he receives from his neighbors, the Hillcrists. Trouble between the two families starts when Hornblower goes against his word and decides to clear a bucolic stretch of woodlands he bought from the Hillcrists. He want to build a mill there and immediately evicts the poor working class tenants who had been living on the land for years; they plead their desperate case to Hillcrist who is convinced to take action. It all ends badly, of course, with both sides being demoralized and undone by their increasingly contemptible behavior which involves blackmail and character assassination. There is even a suicide attempt before the final curtain and in the last ironic shot we see that the efforts to block Hornblower were futile all along, even if he has been defeated and driven from the community. Progress will always triumph in the end and progress means more factories, more jobs and green space be damned.

THE SKIN GAME is a biting critique of the British class system and was quite popular in its day as a stage play. And I can see why Spoto and other critics have called it a “social diatribe.” Still, the film’s central conflict of the rich driving the poor from their homes in the name of progress while ruining the environment is still topical today – and just as compelling, even if the actors occasionally revert to melodramatic overstatement as if performing for the stage.  Certainly the film reveals its stage origins in its static framing and dialogue heavy exposition. Yet Hitchcock finds ways to break the monotomy with unexpected visual flourishes – a series of “whip” camera moves during a tense bidding war, a seamless camera dolly shot during a street scene, a stream of superimposed images flying toward the viewer during one character’s moment of crisis. But the real reason to see the movie is for Gwenn’s testosterone-fueled entrepreneur.

He’s a strutting, bantam-rooster of a man and it gives you some idea of the powerful stage presence Gwenn had in live theatre. Best of all, his character evolves from being the obvious villain of the piece to something more complicated and even admirable. Still, it’s the most aggressive, take-no-prisoners role of any Edmund Gwenn movie I’ve seen.

Much more subtle in his villainy and more deadly is his brief role as Rowley in FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (1940) – another Hitchcock film – where he lures crime reporter Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) to the top of a tall building with an open viewing area and attempts to push him to his death. He’s transparently charming as Jones’ pseudo-bodyguard but Hitchcock clues us to his evil intentions with menacing reaction shots of Rowley when Jones has his back turned and they are talking. It’s barely more than a cameo role but it’s the perfect counterpoint to his Santa Claus in MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET.

Then there’s his sour, humorless department store manager in THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES (1941), in which he develops an extreme dislike for new employee Charles Coburn, who is actually the owner of the company going undercover to discover and expose his detractors. This is a delightful, much underrated comedy about office politics and labor relations and to witness Coburn and Gwenn in a grudge match is fun beyond words. As much as I love them both, I have to admit a supreme satisfaction in seeing Gwenn’s department store manager get his comeuppance from Coburn’s capitalist-turned-socialist. And I’m actually surprised that the film’s screenwriter, Norman Krasna, wasn’t suspected of being a Red on the basis of this seemingly innocuous comedy.

Gwenn is also somebody you wouldn’t want to know in THE MEANEST MAN IN THE WORLD (1943). No, he’s not the title character but an unscrupulous billionaire who hires a naive lawyer (Jack Benny) to evict his elderly sister-in-law from her property so he can obtain it. It doesn’t exactly sound hilarious in terms of our current economy but how can you resist Jack Benny and Edmund Gwenn together? Of course, it’s not on DVD but if we had access to everything when we wanted it, it would kill the fun of the hunt, wouldn’t it?

Gwenn hit another high point with his lovable but less-than-sterling character in MISTER 880 (1950). He’s an amateur counterfeiter posing as “The Skipper,” a junk dealer who has eluded the Secret Service for 20 years and is loved by his neighbors who have no idea about his criminal operation. I guess a felon is no role model but Gwenn is so seductive he makes it seem like a good idea in our current climate. He would garner a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for MISTER 880 but would lose to George Sanders for All About Eve.

Most of Gwenn’s characters though were upstanding citizens and professional men – doctors (The Doctor Takes a Wife, Bewitched), professors and deans (A Yank at Oxford, A Yank at Eton) and men of the cloth (The Keys of the Kingdom, Life With Father, Les Miserables). He was in his share of family films such as Lassie Come Home, Bonzo Goes to College and Mister Scoutmaster and, like Coburn, he often played Cupid or the third wheel in romances such as APARTMENT FOR PEGGY (1948), a more downbeat version of The More the Merrier in which Gwenn plays a lonely old man who is coerced into renting out his attic to a young couple. On the verge of suicide before Peggy (Jeanne Crain) and her husband Jason (William Holden) move in, Gwenn’s character soon finds himself swept up in their lives which eventually restores his will to live.

Gwenn is worth watching in almost anything but my favorite Gwenn performances are featured in THE WALKING DEAD (1936), THEM! (1954), SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935) and THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY (1955), his third and final film for Alfred Hitchcock, though he would later appear in a TV episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

In THE WALKING DEAD, he plays a scientist whose successful experiments in reviving dead animals leads to an attempt to bring a recently executed convict (Boris Karloff) back to life after the latter’s death in the electric chair.  Once revived, Karloff goes after the gangsters who framed him and caused his death but it’s Gwenn’s intellectually curious scientist who almost steals the film.

His Dr. Harold Medford in THEM! is even better and he gets some of the best dialogue in the film which still stands as the king of the fifties mutant insect films. One speech in particular, filmed in close-up on the wind-swept desert plains, has become iconic: “We may be witnessing a Biblical prophecy come true – ‘And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation and the beasts will reign over the earth.’ I also like the fact that Gwenn’s Dr. Medford is invariably practical and doesn’t want to try to “communicate” with this new hostile species like so many other ill-fated scientists in sci-fi classics like The Thing. Nope, he knows a threat when he sees one and helps cheer on the giant ants’ destruction, shouting, “The antennae! Shoot the antennae!” One thing I learned in researching THEM! was that Gwenn almost didn’t get the part. The studio had left the casting up to screenwriter Ted Sherdeman, surprisingly enough,  though they initially opposed his choice of Gwenn for the role of Dr. Harold Medford (they thought he was too old for the part!). But Sherdeman held firm and Gwenn was cast, even though he suffered horribly from advanced arthritis and the extreme heat of the desert sequences during filming. His performance, however, gives THEM! a genuine touch of class.

Gwenn is also particularly memorable in the much maligned George Cukor film, SYLVIA SCARLETT, playing Katherine Hepburn’s debt-ridden father whose financial straits compels his daughter to adopt a male identify so she can get a job and make some money. The first part of the movie is a jolly affair: a quartet composed of Sylvia, her father, Monkley (Cary Grant), a hustler, and Maudie (Dennie Moore), a maid, try their luck as con artists but soon give it up to become a traveling theatre group known as the “Pink Pierrots.” For a while the movie plays as a delightful picaresque road movie with impromptu musical numbers – Gwenn joins Grant and Moore for a charming rendition of “I Do Like to Be By the Seaside” and the entire quartet sing “Hello! Hello!” – but then the story takes a tragic turn when Gwenn falls in love with the flighty Maudie who leaves him. Crushed, he kills himself and Hepburn is so devastated she tries to drown herself. She doesn’t succeed – Grant intervenes – but, as you can imagine, the mixture of whimsy, musical comedy and tragedy didn’t mix too well. Add to this the gender confusion of the romantic subplot in which bohemian artist Henry Fane (Brian Aherne) feels a strong attraction to this strange young boy (Hepburn) and it’s easy to understand how critics and audiences rejected this decidely eclectic film.

Like SYLVIA SCARLETT, Hitchcock’s THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY also displays a quirky sense of humor that is veddy British and wasn’t for everyone. A droll black comedy set in the stunning Autumn landscape of a New England fall, the movie was a wonderful showcase for Shirley MacLaine’s screen debut. But the romance between her and local artist John Forsythe isn’t as endearing as the flirtations going on between Gwenn and Mildred Natwick. Romance on the screen is usually reserved for the young and beautiful but how refreshing to see that sexual attraction – at least in this film – is not defined by the usual Hollywood standards. And Gwenn and Natwick are better darn cute, even with a troublesome corpse in their midst.

I actually know very little about Gwenn’s personal life other than the available information on the internet. He was born Edmund Kellaway in Wandsworth, London on September 26, 1877 and died on September 6, 1959. He was a famous stage actor before he entered films – George Bernard Shaw personally selected Gwenn to star in his stage production of Man and Superman – but once he moved to California in 1935, he remained in the U.S. for the rest of his life, except for the occasional out-of-country film shoot. I also never realized that Estelle Winwood was his sister-in-law and that Cecil Kellaway was his cousin. There is a very informative mini-bio of his life by James L. Mason on the IMDB page for Gwenn that I highly recommend. Upcoming Edwund Gween movies on TCM include THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES (tonight on TCM at 12:15 am), THE BIGAMIST (8/27 at 10 am, 10/22 at 2:15 pm), ANTHONY ADVERSE (8/24 at 3:30 am, 9/16 at 4:30 am), CHALLENGE TO LASSIE (9/10 at 2:30 pm), GREEN DOLPHIN STREET (9/11 at 4 pm), THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY (9/15 at 8 pm, 9/20 at 10 am), THE WALKING DEAD (10/18 at 6 am, 10/30 at 11:15 am) and many more. Just check the TCM web site schedule.