Alan Hale

Studios in the 1930s needed a specific type: broad, loud, physically large, and dependable enough to be dropped into anything on a week's notice. Alan Hale Sr. was that type for two decades. His film career ran forty years in total, and by the middle of it he had become Hollywood's default answer to the question of who plays the hero's best friend.

That friend was usually Errol Flynn. Hale is Little John in The Adventures of Robin Hood, and once the pairing worked the studio simply kept doing it: Dodge City, Virginia City, Santa Fe Trail, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Sea Hawk, Desperate Journey, Gentleman Jim, Adventures of Don Juan. The trick of the performance is that he never competes with the star. He laughs first, takes the fall, absorbs the punchline, and makes the leading man look generous by comparison. That is a harder and rarer skill than it sounds, and it is a large part of why Flynn's swashbucklers feel warm rather than vain.

He was not only a sidekick. He is Danker in It Happened One Night, Emil Miller in Of Human Bondage, Ed Munn in Stella Dallas, a Laurel and Hardy foil in Our Relations, and one of the stranded soldiers in The Lost Patrol. He directed films as well as acting in them. Go back far enough and he is in the 1921 silent The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which is a reminder that he started before sound and adapted to it without fuss. He was still working in 1950, the year he died.