Fred Aldrich

You have seen Fred Aldrich. You have almost certainly never noticed him, which was the job. He broke into the film industry in 1939 with small parts in My Son Is Guilty and Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and across roughly thirty years he appeared in more than 170 films, nearly all of them uncredited.

That is a specific profession, not a failed one. The studio system needed a reliable body who could hold a prop, cross a room on cue, and look like a policeman, a townsman, a dockworker or a bouncer without pulling focus from the star. Aldrich did it inside some of the best films of the period. He is a soldier in The Great Dictator, a detective at the staff meeting in Where the Sidewalk Ends, a ringside photographer in Somebody Up There Likes Me, a prospector in River of No Return, a mover in Bell, Book and Candle, a speakeasy bouncer in Mr. Skeffington and a barfly in A Big Hand for the Little Lady.

His most famous few seconds are in Sunset Boulevard, where he is the officer at the poolside in the opening sequence, doing the thing the entire structure of the film depends on while Joe Gillis narrates over him.

Television absorbed the same skill. He turned up on I Love Lucy as a policeman and returned to that show repeatedly. A filmography like this one is the real texture of Hollywood's studio decades: hundreds of faces doing the work the camera needed and the credits did not record.