Perhaps Warner Bros. had some plan for John Eldredge when it put the actor under contract in 1934. If so, they must have scrapped it, because it's hard to imagine anybody mapping out such a thing as Eldredge's Hollywood career. By a combination of casting directors' whims, a shrewd form of the survival instinct, and the innate grace of someone who just wants to be useful, Eldredge grew into the most inconspicuous of Hollywood's familiar faces.
A fine actor, capable of holding the focus of a scene but usually called on just to fill in the background, he embodied perfectly a kind of general-purpose Americanness, usually urban and presumably college-educated, too indefinite to be called a stereotype but that could be poured into several different kinds of stereotypes: the society snob, the "weakling brother or bland schemer" (Leslie Halliwell, The Filmgoer's Companion), the no-nonsense professional.
By appearing in almost nothing but formula B films, Eldredge remained true to the plasticity of this image; it never became deformed by the more ambitious conceptions of films in which characters gave the illusion of living for some purpose less irrational, unforgiving, and absolute than the requirements of plot.
His personal traits were so evanescent as to barely leave an imprint, yet possessed the subtlety of suggestion by which the adequate imposes itself as necessity: the eyebrow raised querulously or humorously, a voice that often sounded impatient or superior, a soft face with small dark eyes apt to drift away thoughtfully, or from boredom. Often he wore a thin moustache to enhance his sophisticate image or to look more fatuous, depending on circumstances. Although he frequently played villains, he was too unremarkable-looking and too reasonable-natured to be sinister, just as his sympathetic characters were too uninvolved to be good.
"It must take a lot of idlers to support a fool's paradise like this."
--John Eldredge to Barbara Stanwyck in His Brother's Wife
The Futility of Competing
Born in 1904, Eldredge had been part of Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, playing Epihodov in The Cherry Orchard, for example; he was also in the successful production of The Three-Cornered Moon. His first film was The Man with Two Faces, starring Edward G. Robinson and Mary Astor.
In Frank Borzage's Flirtation Walk (1934), Eldredge lost Ruby Keeler to Dick Powell, establishing his specialty of the hero's unsuccessful rival. Sometimes the Eldredgian other man was a heel or outright villain, as in Man of Iron (1935), with Mary Astor and Barton MacLane, and the pointless The Marines Fly High (1940), with Lucille Ball and Chester Morris. Typically, he was disqualified because he was stuffy and unsuited for the girl, as in His Brother's Wife (1936), an agreeably outlandish melodrama in which Barbara Stanwyck marries him temporarily just to spite his brother (Robert Taylor), and Blossoms in the Dust (1940), in which Eldredge's very casting seemed a commentary on the futility of competing with Walter Pidgeon for Greer Garson.
Pyrrhic Victories
The two times Eldredge got the girl could be classed as Pyrrhic victories. Yet these may be the two films for which Eldredge would be "best remembered," if he were remembered at all.
In Dangerous (1935), a turgid, stiffly written film that is hard to dislike, Eldredge rounded out his busy sophomore year at Warners playing a character heralded in the opening credits as Gordon Heath. (Warners films in those days observed what we would now call a quaint custom of showing short clips of the main actors, tagged by their real and character names, after the opening credits.)
Viewers of Dangerous, which is mainly concerned with the rehabilitation of a drunk actress, Joyce Heath (Bette Davis), may be hollering at the 60-minute mark who the hell is Gordon Heath, no one bearing either that name or the classic Eldredge pencil moustache having been seen yet in the film. Suddenly Joyce acts cagey when the subject comes up of marrying Franchot Tone, an architect she loves and who loves her.
The problem, we find when Joyce pays a furtive visit to a walk-up apartment in a seedy section of town, is her husband, the long-awaited Gordon. According to their conversation, she ruined his life, abandoned him, and somehow caused him to be reduced to the position of clerk in a company he once owned, but even when she calls him things like "pathetic milksop" he refuses to grant her a divorce because being married to her in some way validates his miserable existence. Eldredge succeeds at being utterly pathetic and yet not loathsome in this scene, milking the character's masochism without making a maudlin spectacle of himself.
In the next scene, Joyce takes him for a ride in her car. Believing that she has come back to him, he looks at her lovingly. She threatens to crash the car into a tree at a fork in the road, pointing out that if he dies, she is free, and if she dies, what does it matter anyway. More than her match in histrionic pronouncements, Gordon urges her to go ahead and crash the car, since life isn't worth living anyway. For the second time in the film, Eldredge steals a scene from soon-to-be Oscar-winner Davis. (Someone once wrote a letter to Films in Review listing performances he thought should have been nominated for the Academy Award; one of them was Eldredge's in Dangerous.) She hits the tree; both of them survive, but he will be crippled for life, so Joyce decides, out of remorse, to go back to him.
Eldredge's other "best-remembered" role is in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941). Eldredge's previous Bogart film, King of the Underworld (1938), had Eldredge in another other-man variant, the husband who gets killed. In High Sierra, Eldredge has one scene as Lon Preiser, a shady insurance salesman from the East who happens to be the boy friend of the crippled Velma (Joan Leslie). We know he is shady because Velma's "Pa" (Henry Travers) has mentioned him to Roy (Bogart) in terms that lead the viewer to infer that Pa moved the family West partly to get his daughter out of Lon's clutches.
When we finally see Lon he turns out to be just Eldredge, though the slur in his speech suggests an unusually debauched Eldredge. Roy rebuffs his glad-handing, saying "I don't like you. I don't like the way you talk and I don't like your friends"--the most memorable line ever addressed to Eldredge in a film. The seedy role of Lon is uncharacteristic for the actor (so that the misspelling "Elredge" in the end credits is not just an indignity, but an indication that we may have been seeing Eldredge's evil double), but the piece of film that records it has probably been seen by more people than any other image of him and can help identify him to the uninitiated (you remember the scene where the girl's leg's been fixed and she's dancing with this creep? That's the guy).
A Rare Opportunity
Eldredge's best part in a Warners film was probably the role of Don in Oil for the Lamps of China (1935), directed by Mervyn LeRoy. The role offers unusual scope for his talents: manager of a Chinese outpost of an American oil company, he is at first seen dealing high-handedly with the Chinese and being resentful and uncooperative when another company man (Pat O'Brien) arrives to co-manage the operation. Later, he and O'Brien become pals and Eldredge becomes more sympathetic, especially when his son comes down with cholera and finally when he is fired, a development that takes him out of the film's episodic story.
This was a rare opportunity for Eldredge to portray a figure with several dimensions, and possibly having an inkling it might be his last, he made the most of it. Despite Don's relative complexity, the character enters the mainstream of Eldredge roles because of his weakness of will, his air of resignation, the implied awareness that effort and ambition are futile.
Domination through Inconspicuousness
Warners did not retain Eldredge's services after 1941. He had already freelanced for all the other major studios: Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, MGM, RKO, Universal, and Columbia. One of his Fox films is 1937's Charlie Chan at the Olympics, an average to slightly-above-average Warner Oland series entry with Eldredge as the least likely suspect. Blind Alley (1939), a Columbia effort in which Eldredge had a nondescript role as a house guest, is often cited by historians because it was one of the first Hollywood films to deal with psychoanalysis. These films typify the Eldredge mystique, his ineffable ability to inhabit the backgrounds of his films, to embody at the same time the blandness of their outer and the moral shiftiness of their inner universes, to dominate them through inconspicuousness.
This unsung strength was even more notable in his trilogy of ersatz horror films for Universal: The Black Cat (1941), Horror Island (1941), and Joseph H. Lewis's wonderful The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942). In these films, Eldredge is constantly an unreliable and vaguely disagreeable member of groups threatened by unknown malefactors and extreme situations, the one most apt to put down the comedy relief with a bored reproving stare or to get killed while separating from the group.
