Ray Teal

Teal played saxophone and led a band to pay his way through UCLA before he became an actor, and he came to the profession well into adulthood, with his first film work in the late 1930s. The credits here start in the war years with studio filler: a guard in The Princess and the Pirate, a policeman in The Clock, an assistant movie director in Anchors Aweigh, most of it uncredited.

Then Hollywood decided he had a badge in his face, and the pattern is remarkable once you notice it. Among the credits listed here he is a sheriff in Ace in the Hole, in Run for Cover, in Rage at Dawn and in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, a deputy in Along the Great Divide, a police lieutenant in High Wall, a state police lieutenant in The Desperate Hours, a motorcycle cop in both Dead Reckoning and Quicksand, a prison guard in Brute Force, a border inspector in Gun Crazy, and a chief of police in The Liberation of L.B. Jones. He was the definitive version of a specific American type: the local authority who is neither hero nor villain, just the man whose job is to say no.

The better films used exactly that. Billy Wilder put him in uniform inside Ace in the Hole, the most corrosive picture Hollywood ever made about its own press. He is in The Best Years of Our Lives, Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind, One-Eyed Jacks and The Wild One. And from 1959 to 1972 he was Sheriff Roy Coffee of Virginia City on Bonanza, the role that outlived all the rest.