Franklin Pangborn

Franklin Pangborn is one of those faces everyone who loves old comedies knows and few can name, which is precisely the injustice his artistry deserves to correct. In hundreds of films across the 1930s and 1940s he perfected a single glorious character: the prissy, put-upon official, the hotel manager, the desk clerk, the floorwalker, the wedding planner, whose sense of propriety is forever being outraged by the chaos of the leading players.

He came out of the theatre with genuine dramatic training and even some early silent leads, but sound comedy found the perfect vessel in his fluttering hands, his pained expression and his impeccable, affronted diction. Nobody could register offended dignity quite like Pangborn; his slow, disbelieving reaction to some fresh indignity was a comic aria in itself, a study in a man's composure coming apart at the seams.

He was the ideal foil for the great anarchists of screen comedy. W.C. Fields tormented him gloriously, never more so than in "The Bank Dick" (1940), where Pangborn plays a bank examiner reduced to a nervous wreck, and in "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break" (1941). He became a treasured member of Preston Sturges's stock company, bringing his fastidious energy to "The Palm Beach Story" (1942) and, memorably, to the harried civic official of "Hail the Conquering Hero" (1944).

There was a knowing quality to his fussiness that audiences understood; his characters read as gently, unmistakably coded gay figures at a time when such things could only be played sidelong, and he made them witty and sympathetic rather than cruel. He turned the margins the studios allowed him into a space of real personality.

As the studio comedy of his heyday faded, Pangborn moved into radio and early television before his death in 1958. He never had a starring role and never sought the spotlight the leads occupied. Yet his exasperated dignity is woven through the fabric of classic American comedy so thoroughly that the genre would feel measurably poorer without it. He is the patron saint of the perfect reaction shot.