Background
Dana Andrews was born on 1 January 1909 in Collins, Mississippi, United States.
Dana Andrews was born on 1 January 1909 in Collins, Mississippi, United States.
He came to movies rather late, because he was already a qualified accountant and trained singer when he was seen by Goldwyn at the Pasadena Playhouse. Andrews kept as quiet as possible about his singing, and no one would boast in Hollywood about being an accountant. He had ten very good years with Fox (while Goldwyn wasted him), especially as an apparent hero with something to hide. Andrews could suggest unease, shiftiness, and rancor barely concealed by good looks. He did not quite trust or like himself, and so a faraway bitterness haunted him.
He made his screen debut in Lucky Cisco Kid (38, Bruce Humberstone), but had his first worthwhile part in The Westerner (39, William Wyler).
The next few years he worked hard at Fox with occasional pictures for Goldwyn: Sailor’s Lady (40, Allan Dwan); good in Swamp Water (41, Jean Renoir); Belle Starr (41, living Cummings); Tobacco Road (41, John Ford); not quite comfortable as hoodlum Joe Lilac in Ball of Fire (42, I toward Hawks)—it was more a Dan Duryea role, and Durvea plaved his sidekick; Berlin Correspondent (42, Eugene Forde); The North Star (43, Lewis Milestone); impressively resolute as a doomed man in The Ox-Bow Incident (43, William Wellman); The Purple Heart (43, Milestone); and Up in Anns (44, Elliott Nugent).
Then in 1944 he was exactly cast as the insecure, love-stricken police detective in Laura (44, Otto Preminger). Now a leading actor, he was in State Fair (45, Walter Lang); A Walk in the Sun (46, Milestone); not even nominated for his fine work in The Best Years of Our Lives (46, Wyler); Canyon Passage (46. Jacques Tourneur);
Boomerang (47, Elia Kazan); Night Song (47, John Cromwell), playing a blind pianist; The Iron Curtain (48, Wellman); No Minor Vices (48, Milestone); in the J. D. Salinger adaptation My Foolish Heart (49, Mark Robson); Britannia Mews (49, Jean Neguleseo); a priest in Edge of Doom (50, Robson); and I Want You (50, Robson), the end of his Goldwyn contract.
Preminger alone mined the strain of moral ambiguity in his bearing, the automatic smile and the slur iu his voice: as the indecisive con man in Fallen Angel (45), the big shot who calls everyone “honeybunch” in Daisy Kenyon (47), and the crooked detective in Where the Sidewalk Ends (50).
He began to decline, and he was forced farther afield to find small pictures that would have him: Sealed Cargo (51, Alfred Werker); Assignment Paris (52, Robert Parrish); Elephant Walk (53, William Dieterle); Duel in the Jungle (54, George Marshall); Strange Lady iu Town (55, Mervyn Le Roy); While the City Sleeps (56, Fritz Lang); ideal again as the lying hero in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (56, Lang); Night of the Demon (57, Tourneur); Zero Hour (57, Hall Bartlett); and Enchanted Island (58, Dwan). He was briefly memorable in In Harm’s Way (61, Preminger) and as the broken Red Ridingwood in The Last Tycoon (76, Kazan). His last films were Good Guys Wear Black (77, Ted Post); The Pilot (79, Cliff Robertson); and Prince Jack (84, Bert Lovitt).
He had been unwell for years. His final films were unworthy of him. He was a clever and subtle actor, always at his best playing “ordinary, albeit fallen, guys.