Erskine Sanford

Sanford belongs to the Mercury Theatre, and the Mercury Theatre belongs to Orson Welles, which is why an actor long associated with the Theatre Guild is remembered chiefly for a few minutes of screen time in 1941. He was Herbert Carter in Citizen Kane, the newspaper editor being pushed aside by his new proprietor, perspiring and blustering his way through a scene that exists to establish what sort of man Kane intends to become.

Welles kept using him, and always for the same purpose: as a pressure valve. Roger Bronson in The Magnificent Ambersons, the judge in The Lady from Shanghai, a party guest in The Stranger, and Duncan in the 1948 Macbeth, a piece of casting that turns a king into a fussy old administrator.

Outside the Mercury circle he worked steadily through the 1940s in the sort of parts that often go unnamed on the credits: Dr. Galt in Spellbound, Bullard in The Best Years of Our Lives, an undertaker in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a porter in Letter from an Unknown Woman, a doctor in Possessed and another in the noir Impact, plus Crack-Up, Angel on My Shoulder and Without Reservations. Several are uncredited.

The ideal Sanford part is a man being talked over. That sounds like faint praise and is not. A film needs someone whose flapping establishes the confidence of everyone around him, and for a decade he was the reliable choice for it.