{"id":10096,"date":"2020-11-13T09:00:51","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T09:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10096"},"modified":"2025-11-13T19:19:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T19:19:19","slug":"jack-elam-on-westerns-auditing-acting-and-that-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10096","title":{"rendered":"Jack Elam on westerns, auditing, acting … and that fly"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

With his blind left eye, American character actor Jack Elam, who was born 100 years ago today, made a perfect villain in hundreds of TV shows and feature films but he told me he was a better auditor than he was an actor.<\/p>\n

He started out in the film business as a chartered accountant and worked as an auditor for Samuel Goldwyn Studios and General Services Studios: ‘I do believe that I was as good an auditor as there was when I was an auditor. I was as high a salaried auditor as there was so I knew my business. I felt a very great self-respect as an auditor, which as an actor is pretty hard to feel because you might like what I\u2019m doing and the other fella doesn\u2019t like it at all. You say, jeez, I thought you were great in such-and-such and he says he thought it was a terrible fucking thing and you were awful. There are no matters of opinion in audting. If the sonofabitch balances, you can shove it up your ass, your opinion. You can go fuck it, you know?\u2019<\/p>\n

You might think the kind of personality that balances columns of figures wouldn\u2019t necessarily have the imagination and the creative freedom to be an actor, but Elam said:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u2018It doesn\u2019t take any imagination or creative freedom to be an actor. Doesn\u2019t take either one of those things. It just takes the guts to go stand in front of a camera and talk, the ability to memorise the goddam lines. There\u2019s no creative thinking about acting to that extent. There\u2019s no more creative thing about acting than there is about auditing. You come to me with your books to balance and I can look at \u2018em and say, wait a minite, I think I know where I\u2019ll find it, and I can save thousands of hours of work by being able to understand where the shortage is. That\u2019s just as creative as actors creating. When I went into it, I didn\u2019t know anything about acting. I\u2019ve learned through doing it.\u2019<\/p>\n

His left eye was blinded when a fellow boy scout accidentally stuck him with a pencil as a boy. He quit accounting when a doctor told him he risked sight in his other eye if he \"\"<\/a>continued staring at financial reports. He became an actor when he helped finance a friend\u2019s movies in return for roles. I spoke to the genial but thoroughly professional actor \u2013 who died in 2003 \u00a0\u2013 at an NBC-TV gathering during the Television Critics Association tour in Los Angeles in January 1987. Famous for his evil roles, he was equally adept at comedy in movies and TV shows.\u00a0That year, he appeared in a sitcom titled \u2018Easy Street \u2019as an ageing hillbilly named Bully who is brought to live in Beverly Hills by a distant and suddenly rich relative played by Loni Anderson (above with Elam and Lee Weaver).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I asked if he had a favourite of the films he\u2019d made: \u2018No way to tell you. Actually, it would be a series of steps. My favourite early one would be \u201cRawhide\u201d with Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward (pictured with Elam left) in 1950 because it\u2019s the one that blasted my career and I\u2019ve never been out of work since. Then, I\u2019d go to \u201cSupport Your Local Sheriff\u201d with Jim Garner (pictured below) because that was the change into comedy. There\u2019ve been many that I loved. Listen, let me tell you something. I would have been very happy to have played that Frankenstein monster the rest of my life. I loved that sonofabitch. I like Bully in this show and it\u2019s a nice company. I just don\u2019t like the process. I don\u2019t like the live camera stuff.\u2019<\/p>\n

In an earlier press conference, he said Burt Kennedy (\u2018The Rounders\u2019, \u2018The War Wagon\u2019, \u2018Support Your Local Sheriff\u2019) was the best director of westerns he\u2019d worked with and I told him that surprised me given all the directors he’d worked with. He said, \u2018I\u2019ll tell you what surprised the shit out of me: somebody just asked me what has he done. I thought, you\u2019re putting me on. Burt Kennedy, in my opinion, has done some of the best westerns. For example, \u2018Support Your Local Sheriff\u2019 was one of the biggest grossing westerns of the year. It won the Box Office Award, all kinds of award. I can\u2019t believe that people don\u2019t know what Burt Kennedy has done.\u2019<\/p>\n

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He put Howard Hawks (\u2018Rio Bravo\u2019, \u2018El Dorado\u2019, \u2018Rio Lobo\u2019) in second place: \u2018I put Howard at number two because Howard\u2019s gone and Burt is a personal friend. I did only a couple of pictures for Howard. I\u2019ve done nine for Burt so that becomes a difference. I think he\u2019s very definitely in Howard\u2019s category, though, because they work the same way. Howard was very easy. We\u2019d sit around, talk about the script, he\u2019d ask if we had any ideas, any changes we wanted to make. He\u2019d ask Duke what d\u2019you think? Duke\u2019d say, well, I think we oughta come over the hill there, we oughta have more guys than we\u2019ve got. Howard would say, fine, Duke, we\u2019ll do that. It was very congenial but he had his finger on everything going on.\u2019<\/p>\n

Did they think they were creating art? ‘No, it was just let\u2019s do it. It was our job. It was a professional thing. Our job is to make a movie. In those days \u2026 let\u2019s go back to Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, those guys. I never saw one of \u2018em ever late. Duke Wayne (with Elam in ‘Rio Lobo’ below). They were never late. I never saw one of \u2018em didn\u2019t know his lines. They came prepared, they came on time. They expected to have to work, it was a profession. The making of the picture itself, they didn\u2019t consider themselves some special kind of artist. They considered themselves, I don\u2019t know, actors who were just hired to fill a role.\u2019 Were the directors were in sync with that? \u2018Oh, yes, absolutely, right down the line. In those days, the directors, even the ones that were mean like John Farrow (\u201cRide Vaquero\u201d 1953), he was kind of a mean man but he was right on the nose.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Was working with Sergio Leone different? \u2018Well, Leone had all the money and all the time in the world so it was almost like a game to him. I don\u2019t know that I ever made a contact with him because I only did the one show with him and I was on it only about ten days.\u2019 Leone directed Elam in one of the most iconic scenes in western movies \u2013 a man, a gun and a housefly. In the opening scene of Sergio Leone\u2019s epic \u2018Once Upon a Time in the West\u2019 (below), three bored gunmen await the arrival of a train at a dusty frontier outpost. One of them, played by Elam, sits in a chair as flies buzz around his grizzled chin when suddenly he traps a fly in the barrel of his six-shooter. The special effects man had a fly on a wire and they could have done the shot in two hours, he told me: \u2018Leone said no, no, he wanted it to fly. We took a day and a half before I caught a fucking fly. He smeared apricot jam from the lunch table on my beard thinking it would attract flies. Well, they came to my beard but they wouldn\u2019t go where I could catch \u2018em. Then he smeared honey in my beard. No luck. One afternoon, we broke and there was some watermelon on the set. He spread some watermelon on me. Millions of flies came and I caught a fly.’ Leone\u00a0offered him another film \u00a0afterwards but Elam said drily, ‘I had a good enough time on that one. I was busy so I said I\u2019ll just pass.’<\/p>\n

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Did spaghetti westerns ruin things for the Hollywood western? Elam said, \u2018I think the greatest damage was probably \u201cBlazing Saddles\u201d. It was a big success, a $100 million gross or whatever it was but it made fun of westerns and I don\u2019t think you can make fun of westerns and then come back. Burt Kennedy had two or three good prokects in the works and he and I went to see \u201cBlazing Saddles\u201d amd neither one of us liked it. All of his projects were cancelled because none of them were comedies. Go back and look at the record, there were no westerns made since that date except the occasional one or two like \u2018Pale Rider\u2019, there would be one or two but that ended the eight or ten westerns a year, that ended it.\u2019 I suggested that perhaps sci-fi movies also contributed as they were westerns in space: \u2018I think they probably had a lot to do with it. We have a generation now \u2026 I don\u2019t see any cowboys. I see \u201cStar Wars\u201d with kids \u2026 I\u2019ve got two kids and I don\u2019t see any cowboys at home. Westerns are too straight, maybe, there\u2019s a black hat, there\u2019s a white hat.\u2019 What about Rambo? \u2018I can\u2019t relate him to a western at all. That\u2019s something kids can understand because there\u2019s no dreaming to that. Let me play you some cowboy music, there\u2019s a dream to the cowboy. The cowboy\u2019s a quiet soul. Go look at the westerns, really look at Gary Cooper and Bob Taylor and those westerns they did, and Kirk Douglas, those guys, they don\u2019t come on in front. Rambo is a front character, it\u2019s another personality entirely so I don\u2019t see any relationship of any kid. Of course, I\u2019m in love with the other thing.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett With his blind left eye, American character actor Jack Elam, who was born 100 years ago today, made a perfect villain in hundreds of TV shows and feature films but he told me he was a better … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1263],"tags":[5102,5099,5100,5101,5095,3986,5093,2032,5098,5094,5097,5096],"class_list":["post-10096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","tag-easy-street","tag-once-upon-a-time-in-the-west","tag-rawhide","tag-support-your-local-sheriff","tag-burt-kennedy","tag-howard-hawks","tag-jack-elam","tag-james-garner","tag-loni-anderson","tag-sergio-leone","tag-susan-hayward","tag-tyrone-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10096"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11544,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10096\/revisions\/11544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}