Three years later, Eldredge was dead, age 56, heart attack. His last film was the obscure Five Guns to Tombstone (1961).
From 1944 on, Eldredge worked mostly for Monogram and Republic, the largest of the poverty row studios. Slightly mature for unsuccessful-suitor-type roles (although he was considered eligible enough to get the girl in the surprise ending of Dark Alibi, a 1946 Charlie Chan), Eldredge was usually cast as mild-mannered authority figures such as district attorneys, judges, and doctors or as smooth villains--a kind of second-string Jonathan Hale or Jerome Cowan. Whenever he appeared he elevated the proceedings.
A Monogram airport in Live Wires.
Apart from his Chan and Bowery Boys films and fluke A-picture credits such as Paramount's Whispering Smith (1949) with Alan Ladd and Champagne for Caesar (1950) with Ronald Colman and Vincent Price, Eldredge's late-forties/early-fifties appearances were all in films that are never revived. The film aficionado can perhaps best appreciate the pity of this state of affairs by considering the 1950 Republic title Lonely Heart Bandits, the only film in which Eldredge was the male lead. Eldredge plays the male half of a pair of grifters who seduce, swindle, and kill lonely middle-aged people looking for companionship. Directed by George (The Hypnotic Eye) Blair and based on the same true story that inspired the cult hit The Honeymoon Killers, Lonely Heart Bandits deserves attention as the one time Eldredge tore the mask off the bland, well-adjusted characters he specialized in playing. If not a top priority of film preservation, the revival of Lonely Heart Bandits should at least be someone's weekend side project.
Americans in Paris: Gene Kelly, Hayden Rorke, Nina Foch, and Eldredge
Eldredge's last decade is shrouded in obscurity and includes a number of unbilled performances. In 1952 he had an all-too typical part in the Bowery Boys film No Holds Barred as the doctor who diagnoses Sach's unusual hardness of the skull. The year before, he did a bit in Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris as Mr. Jansen, one of a group of Americans whom Gene Kelly and Nina Foch meet in a Paris night club. Although without dialogue, Mr. Jansen is probably the ultimate Eldredge part: a masterly portrait of the American abroad, arrogantly at home in a culture which he is determined will not impress him, unwilling to take his pipe out of his mouth long enough to acknowledge an introduction.
This dim casualty of social adaptation was not to be Eldredge's final statement on the subject. During the fifties, he had a regular part as the heroine's father on a show called Meet Corliss Archer. He worked sporadically, thanklessly in films, popping up out of nowhere unbilled to put out a fire in the basement of a suburban house in Invaders from Mars (1953), for example.
Nothing he had done, however, except perhaps his polite but slightly frayed criminal masterminds in episodes of Superman, could have prepared followers of his career for the heavy middle-aged weariness of his performance in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). As the chief of police of a small city, Eldredge manages to radiate small-city brutality and decay even though his part consists mainly of consoling the heroine (Gloria Talbott), his goddaughter. Not unexpectedly, Chief Collins turns out to have been taken over by aliens. Eldredge staring out his office window while lightning exposes the alien form beneath the mask of his heavy gray face is one of those cancerous images that were Hollywood's counterparts to the dread and revulsion in the prose of Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford.
Three years later, Eldredge was dead, age 56, heart attack. His last film was the obscure Five Guns to Tombstone (1961).
Cashing it in: Five Guns to TombstoneWatch this space for signs of the Louis Jean Heydt Memorial Page.
Updated November 2001.