Jack Curtis

Curtis worked on stage and in vaudeville before films, and he began in pictures in 1915. The earliest credit here is Murphy in Graft, from that same year. Over the next thirty-five years he appeared in more than 150 films, and almost every role in the list below carries the same parenthesis: uncredited.

The pleasure of a career like this is where it puts a man. He is a villager in Frankenstein and again in How Green Was My Valley. He is a bartender in Stagecoach, in My Darling Clementine and in 3 Godfathers, which is to say he poured drinks in three John Ford pictures. He is a policeman in It Happened One Night, a prison guard in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, a speakeasy customer in Baby Face, a sepoy in The Charge of the Light Brigade, a pub patron in Dressed to Kill, a townsman in Winchester '73 and in Pinky.

The largest part listed is McTeague Sr. in Erich von Stroheim's Greed, in 1924, and even that is uncredited. He was born in San Francisco, worked until around 1950, and died in 1956. There is no leading role anywhere in this record and there was never going to be one. What there is instead is a man standing at the back of some of the most famous frames in American film, over and over, for three and a half decades.