Crahan Denton
Crahan Denton is an actor, born 1914.
Some faces only make sense in one decade. Crahan Denton had the face of a man who had been outdoors and was not happy about it, and American film between 1960 and 1963 could not get enough of it. Born in Seattle in 1914, he came up through the stage and through live television anthologies, Omnibus and DuPont Show of the Month among them, and moved into features late.
The role he is remembered for is Walter Cunningham in To Kill a Mockingbird, the poor farmer who pays Atticus Finch in produce because he has no money, and who later stands at the head of the mob outside the jail. It is a small part doing an enormous amount of work: the film needs one man in that crowd to be reachable, and Denton makes him reachable without softening him for a second.
The rest of the run is the same instrument at different temperatures. Jesse in Hud, Kramer in Birdman of Alcatraz, Jackson in The Young One, Hecky in The Parent Trap, a general in Captain Newman, M.D., and steady television work in westerns and crime, Have Gun, Will Travel, Tate and The Fugitive. He died in 1966, and the run of good parts had lasted barely five years.
Movies (6)
TV (5)
Where to start with Crahan Denton
Watch To Kill a Mockingbird again, but follow Denton through the jailhouse sequence instead of the child standing in front of him. He is playing a man who knows exactly how shameful the thing he is doing is, and doing it anyway, and the whole performance sits in how little he says.
Hud is the second stop, a hard, unsentimental Texas picture where his kind of weathered realism is the house style rather than the exception. Birdman of Alcatraz and The Young One show the range of that same instrument, prison drama on one side and hothouse melodrama on the other.
For the lighter version, The Parent Trap drops him into a Disney comedy, which is the funniest line on his filmography. The Fugitive is where to find the television Denton, doing in forty minutes what the films gave him two scenes to do.