Word: bit-part
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Three Violent People (Paramount), a frazzled old carpetbag about a Confederate veteran fighting off a Yankee land-grabber, makes one (and only one) original contribution: Tom Tryon, a 31-year-old bit-part boy from Broadway who, in his first good screen part as the one-armed brother of the hero (Charlton Heston), displays what one publicist has described as "175 pounds of dreamy meat." The boy is a skillful actor. At one point he even manages to steal a scene from Heroine Anne Baxter, who is probably the most relentless camera-hugger in the business...
...wacky motivations and a fair number of funny moments. It pries open the mind and pleads the cause of childhood, and, by contrasting old-maid tea parties with raffish mobster quadrilles, pleads the cause of bohemia, too. It also lets Helen Hayes go on an expert binge of bit-part shenanigans...
...Manhattan, Actress Gertrude (The King and I) Lawrence signed on for a bit-part in civil defense, got billing as air raid warden...
...later seasons Ureli Corelli Hill bankrupted himself in the California gold rush, returned to borrow the Philharmonic's sinking fund, in the process nearly sank the orchestra. At 70 he retired from music to take a flyer as a bit-part actor in legitimate drama. A disastrous venture in New Jersey real estate catapulted him back into Manhattan concert managing. In 1875 Ureli Corelli Hill took an overdose of morphine. Beside his body, police discovered a note. "Ha, ha!" it read, "I go, the sooner the better...
Edward Arnold, as a scatterbrained business-executive, does his usual polished job; and Jean Rogers, the other woman in Pidgeon's life, has more oomph for our money than most of the higher paid oomph-girls. For the denouncement, tobacco-chewing Guy Kibbee renders a juicy bit-part as presiding judge of a nonsensical court-scene, in which Pidgeon gets Miss Russell on the stand and proposes to her in the ritual of jurisprudence...