Douglas Fowley
Douglas Fowley is an actor, born 1911.
More than 240 films is not a career so much as a shift pattern. Fowley came out of the Bronx into the studio system in the early 1930s and simply never stopped: an uncredited taxi driver in The Thin Man, Chick Page in Small Town Girl, Munger in Dodge City. Through the 1940s he settled into the useful middle distance of American movies, playing Georgie Gaver in The Hucksters, Pete in the tight little noir Desperate, Jones in Mighty Joe Young and Kipp Kippton among the infantry of Battleground.
Then, in 1952, came the one part everybody has seen. Roscoe Dexter in Singin' in the Rain is a director being slowly destroyed by the arrival of sound, purple behind his megaphone while a microphone hides in a bush, and Fowley plays panic as a professional condition rather than as a joke. It is the funniest supporting performance in the film after the obvious one.
Television paid for the rest, mostly in westerns. He was Doc Fabrique and then Doc Holliday on The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, turned up on The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok and Temple Houston, and played Grandpa Andrew Hanks in Pistols 'n' Petticoats. The same grizzled register carried him through late character work in The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, Walking Tall and The White Buffalo. His son was the record producer Kim Fowley.
Movies (23)
- Singin' in the Rain (1952)
- Barabbas (1961)
- Angels in the Outfield (1951)
- The Thin Man (1934)
- The White Buffalo (1977)
- Walking Tall (1973)
- The Naked Jungle (1954)
- Mighty Joe Young (1949)
- The High and the Mighty (1954)
- Horizons West (1952)
- From Noon Till Three (1976)
- Guns of Diablo (1964)
- The Man Behind The Gun (1953)
- Battleground (1949)
- The Band Wagon (1953)
- Across the Wide Missouri (1951)
- Small Town Girl (1936)
- Desperate (1947)
- 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)
- The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969)
- Dodge City (1939)
- The Hucksters (1947)
- Killer Shark (1950)
TV (8)
Where to start with Douglas Fowley
Put Singin' in the Rain on and watch the man in the director's chair rather than the dancers: Roscoe Dexter's slow collapse is the film's whole argument about the coming of sound, played by an actor who had been in the business since the early 30s and knew exactly what that panic looked like.
For the westerns, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp is the long-running one and the reason a generation knew his face, with Fowley as a tubercular Doc Holliday. Desperate is the best of his noir work, cheap and fast and mean, while Battleground and Mighty Joe Young show the range of a working contract player inside a single year.
Late on, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and The White Buffalo use him as weathered scenery, and Walking Tall gives him a judge with actual authority. Anything marked uncredited can wait.