Edward Clark

Edward Clark had a name in 1915. He plays Grant Fisher in Graft, from the silent era, and that is close to the last time a cinema audience was told who he was. Nearly every credit that follows is marked uncredited.

He was born in Russia, worked in American film from the silent period into the 1950s, and ran a parallel life in the theatre as a playwright and a director. He wrote songs too, among them an 1899 barbershop quartet number called "Heart of My Heart". He died in Hollywood of a heart attack.

The interest of the filmography is what it says about the studio system's appetite for faces. He is Miriam's boss in Strangers on a Train, a member of the ship's crew in King Kong, a draft board member in East of Eden, a motor court proprietor in Ball of Fire, an usher in Phantom of the Opera, a news stand dealer in The Blue Gardenia, a train steward in Experiment Perilous, a minister in It's a Great Feeling, an inquest juror in Jungle Woman. Nine pictures, nine functions, no names.

That is not really a sad story. It is a working life: decades of steady employment inside some of the largest films Hollywood made, turning up in a Hitchcock thriller, a Kazan drama, a Howard Hawks comedy and a giant-ape picture, always in the second row. Watch enough classic-era cinema and you have seen him many times without once being asked to notice.