Miles Malleson
Miles Malleson ran two careers at once. He wrote: screenplays, including the 1940 Thief of Bagdad, and English versions of Moliere for the stage. He also acted, almost always in small parts, and the small parts are what survived. British cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s is full of him, usually ninety seconds at a time.
The roles are a roll-call of English officialdom. He is The Hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Tailor in The Man in the White Suit, a bishop in Murder Ahoy and another in The Hound of the Baskervilles, an undertaker in Hammer's 1958 Dracula, a registrar in First Men in the Moon, a clergyman in The Naked Truth, Mr. Rankeillor in Kidnapped. The joke is always the same and it never wears out: a man performing his job with enormous, fussy seriousness while the film around him falls apart.
Late on, Hammer gave him more room. As Dr. Tobler in The Brides of Dracula he plays a village doctor who is both a hypochondriac and extremely interested in his fee, which is about as close to a leading comic part as he ever got in horror. He also turns up in the strangest place on this list, one scene as an elderly customer in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, providing the last laugh a viewer gets before that film stops being funny.
Movies (17)
- Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
- Dead of Night (1945)
- Dracula (1958)
- Stage Fright (1950)
- Peeping Tom (1960)
- Scrooge (1951)
- The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
- The 39 Steps (1935)
- Murder Ahoy (1964)
- The Brides of Dracula (1960)
- The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
- The Man Who Never Was (1956)
- The Naked Truth (1957)
- First Men in the Moon (1964)
- The Man in the White Suit (1951)
- I'm All Right Jack (1959)
- Kidnapped (1960)
Where to start with Miles Malleson
Two Ealing comedies are the best introduction. Kind Hearts and Coronets gives him a hangman taking professional pride in a very unusual client, and The Man in the White Suit gives him a tailor confronted with a fabric that will put him out of business. Both are one-scene jobs and both are scenes people quote.
After that, go to the horror. The Brides of Dracula is the largest part he has here, and Dracula hides him in the undertaker's shop for a moment Hammer fans hunt for. The Hound of the Baskervilles puts him in the same studio's Sherlock Holmes as Bishop Frankland.
For range, Peeping Tom uses him as a brief, very funny intrusion into a genuinely uncomfortable film, and The Thief of Bagdad lets him act in a picture he also helped write. Save Dead of Night for last: he has barely anything to do in it and the scene is famous anyway.