Felton Perry
Felton Perry is an actor, born 1945.
1973 gave Felton Perry two roles that outlasted almost everything else he did. He played Deputy Obra Eaker in Walking Tall and Inspector Early Smith in Magnum Force, the second Dirty Harry film, in the same year, both of them the decent cop standing next to a much more violent lead. The Chicago-born actor had already appeared on television series including Ironside and Here Come the Brides.
The role that outlived both came fourteen years later and inverted the type. In RoboCop he is Donald Johnson, an executive at Omni Consumer Products, and the joke of the character is corporate survival: Johnson is the man in the meeting who agrees with whoever is currently winning. Perry played him with a nervous, ingratiating smile that reads as comedy until you notice how accurate it is, and he came back for RoboCop 2 in 1990 and RoboCop 3 in 1993. Across a trilogy that gets progressively worse, Johnson is still there in the third film, which is the sharpest satire the later entries manage.
The rest is a solid character actor's CV: Scott in The Towering Inferno, Al in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Detective Dale in Dumb and Dumber, an inspector in Hooperman, Mr Foster in Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, a doctor in Puppet Master 4, and voice work in The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat. He is now retired.
Movies (12)
TV (9)
Where to start with Felton Perry
Two 1973 films, and Magnum Force is the one to take first. It is the best-made picture on his record, his Early Smith is the only person in it behaving reasonably, and the film is much stranger about police violence than its reputation suggests.
RoboCop is the essential credit though. Watch the boardroom scenes and you will see exactly what he is doing with Johnson, and then watch him do it again in RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3 as the films decay around him.
Walking Tall is the other 1973 one, rougher and more sentimental. The Towering Inferno is the big-studio disaster spectacle, Down and Out in Beverly Hills the sharpest comedy on the list, and Dumb and Dumber a small late appearance most viewers have seen without registering him.