Edward Binns

A Philadelphian who came up when American actors moved freely between Broadway, live television and the movies, Binns spent the 1950s doing all three. His television credits read as a roll call of the anthology era, with appearances across Kraft Television Theatre, Suspense, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Omnibus, Alcoa Theatre and Inner Sanctum, and the earliest film credit on his page is about as low as billing goes: an uncredited soldier in the closing tracking shot of Halls of Montezuma in 1951.

What he sold was competence. Binns played the men who do the job and expect to be believed while doing it, and directors used him as ballast whenever a plot needed a plausible professional to hold it down. Juror 6 in 12 Angry Men, Captain Junket in North by Northwest, Tom Daly in Compulsion, Senator Burkette in Judgment at Nuremberg, Colonel Jack Grady in Fail Safe, Admiral Thomas Healy in The Americanization of Emily, General Walter Bedell Smith in Patton. Put him in a uniform or behind a desk and the surrounding fiction gained about ten percent more weight.

He worked steadily through the television era that followed, including Wallie Powers on It Takes a Thief, and the later films are worth more than their billing suggests: Joey Ziegler in Night Moves in 1975, then Bishop Brophy in The Verdict in 1982, thirty one years after the uncredited soldier. He died in 1990. Almost nobody outside the trade could name him, and almost everybody has watched him.