Background
Elisha Cook Jr. was born on 26 December 1903 in San Francisco, California, United States.
Elisha Cook Jr. was born on 26 December 1903 in San Francisco, California, United States.
He could be a loudmouth bullying the air around him, like Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon (41, John Huston), and he could be a quiet, gutsy squirt, like Henry Jones in The Big Sleep (46, Howard Hawks). It wasn’t a big adjustment, going from one to the other; and maybe it wasn’t a huge range. But Elisha Cook was guaranteed. Put him in a bad picture, and he made it watchable for ten minutes. Put him in something good and he was a metaphor for glue, or the medium itself. He could make you trust a film.
The list is longer than this, because he kept working: Her Unborn Child (29, Charles McGrath and Albert Ray); Pigskin Parade (36, David Butler), as a campus radical; Two in a Crowd (36, Alfred E. Green); Love Is News (37, Tay Garnett); They Won't Forget (37, Merven LeRoy); Submarine Patrol (38, John Ford); The Stranger on the Third Floor (40, Boris Ingster); Tin Pan Alley (40, Walter Lang); Love Crazy (41, Jack Conway); / Wake Up Screaming (41, II. Bruce Humberstone); with Laurel and Hardy in A-Uaunting We Will Go (42, Alfred Werker); as the hopped-up drummer who notices Ella Raines in Phantom Lady (44, Robert Siodmak); Up in Arms (44, Elliott Nugent); Dark Waters (44, Andre de Toth); Dillinger (45, Max Nosseck).
He was in Cinderella Jones (46, Busby Berkeley); Two Small People (46, Jules Dassin); The Falcon’s Alibi (46, Ray McCarev); Born to Kill (47, Robert Wise); The Long Night (47, Anatole Litvak); The Gangster (47, Gordon Wiles); Flaxy Martin (49. Richard Bare); The Great Gatsby (49, Nugent); Behave Yourself (51, George Beck); Don '1 Bother to Knock (52, Roy Baker); lifted off his feet by Jack Palance’s gunfire in Shane (53, George Stevens); the Jury (53, Harry Essex); Thunder Over the Plains (53, de Toth); Drum Beat (54, Delmer Daves); The Indian Fighter (55, de Toth); never better than as the henpecked teller, George Peatty, in The Killing (56, Stanley Kubrick).
He did The Lonely Man (57, Henry Levin); Chicago Confidential (57, Sidney Salkow); Voodoo Island (57, Reginald Le Borg); Baby Face Nelson (57, Don Siegel); Plunder Road (57, Hubert Cornfield); House on Haunted Hill (58, William Castle); Day of the Outlaw (59, de Toth); Platinum High School (60, Charles Haas); College Confidential (60, Albert Zugsmith); One-Eyed Jacks (61, Marlon Brando); Black Zoo (63, Robert Gordon), The Haunted Palace (63, Roger Corman); Johnny Cool (63, William Asher); Blood on the Arrow (64, Salkow); Welcome to Hard Times (67, Burt Kennedy); Rosemary's Baby (68, Roman Polanski); The Great Bank Robbery (69, Hy Aver- baek); El Condor (70, John Guillermin); The Great Northfeld Minnesota Raid (72, Philip Kaufman).
He is beaten senseless in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (73, Sam Peckinpah); Emperor of the North (73, Robert Aldrich); Electro Glide in Blue (73, James William Guercio); The Outfit (74, John Flynn); Winterhawks (76, Charles B. Pierce); after the falcon again in The Black Bird (76, David Giler); St. Ives (76, J. Lee Thompson); The Champ (79, Franco Zeffirelli); 1941 (79, Steven Spielberg); Corny (80, Robert Kaylor); Tom Horn (80, William Wiard); Harry’s War (81, Keith Merrill); Hammett (82, Wim Wenders).
He was small, scrawny; he was losing his hair, and he had a high-pitched voice; he had eyes screwed into his head with all the desperate resolve of wanting to be taken seriously.