Background
Broderick Crawford was born on 9 December 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The son of actors Lester Crawford and Helen Broderick, Broderick Crawford was squat, burly, fast talking, and belligerent.
Broderick Crawford was born on 9 December 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The son of actors Lester Crawford and Helen Broderick, Broderick Crawford was squat, burly, fast talking, and belligerent.
He began playing gangsters and knockabout comedy: Woman Chases Man (37. John Blystone); Hathaway’s The Real Cion/ (39); Beau Geste (39, William Wellman): Tay Garnett’s Eternally Yours (39); Slightly Honorable (40, Garnett); George Marshall’s When the Daltons Rode (40); Seven Sinners (40, Garnett); Trail of the Vigilantes (40, Allan Dwan); The Black Cat (41, Albert S. Rogell); Larceny Inc. (42, Lloyd Bacon); and Broadway (42, William A. Seiter). After war sendee, he returned to cheap Westerns, Night Unto Night (47, Don Siegel); Slave Girl (47, Charles Lament); The Time of Your Life (48, H. C. Potter); A Kiss in the Dark (49, Delmer Daves); and Ining Rapper’s white Anna Lucasta (49).
Robert Rossen then cast him as the demagogue in All the King’s Men (49), a part so suited to Crawford’s loudmouth stvle that he won an Oscar. But the same character is more cleverly portrayed in Cukor’s Born Yesterday (50)—a Columbia film in which Crawford gives a remarkable likeness of the studio boss, Harry Cohn. Crawford never capitalized on these successes, and after Lone Star (52, Vincent Sherman), Last of the Coma aches (52, André de Toth), Scandal Sheet (52, Phil Karlson), Night People (54, Normally Johnson), and Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (54), he cashed in as the central figure in the TV series Highway Patrol (55-59). As a relaxation he played one of the swindlers in Fellini’s II Bidone (55); in New York Confidential (55, Russell Rouse); Not as a Stranger (55, Stanley Kramer); Big House, USA (55, Howard W. Koch); Rouse’s The Fastest Gun Alive (58); and as the heavy in The Decks Ran Red (58, Andrew L. Stone). When bis TV career faded out, he returned to movies in small parts but his own monotonous bluster and the TV familiarity had largely exhausted his appeal.
He became a support in B Westerns, such as Red Tomahawk (66, R. G. Springsteen); in Embassy (72, Gordon Hessler); Smashing the Crime Syndicate (73, Al Adamson); and Terror in the Wax Museum (73, Georg Fenadv). He was also the victim of a serious automobile accident, but came back full force as the nation’s top cleaner in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (77, Larry Cohen); and played “Brod” in A Little Romance (79, George Roy Hill); There Goes the Bride (79, Terence Marcel); Harlequin (80, Simon Wincer); Den Tuchtigen Gehort Die Welt (81, Peter Patzak); and Liar’s Moon (81, David Fisher).