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Although his bulgy-eyed brand of humor was once popular and considered funny, "second banana" character actor Mantan Moreland, who maintained a steadfast career playing cocky but jittery characters in late 1930s and early 1940s comedy, would later be ostracized for it. The talented funnyman, who gained his strongest recognition in a long string of comedy thrillers, would eventually find himself on the unemployment line.
Born to a Dixieland bandleader just after the turn of the century in Louisiana on September 3, 1902, Mantan developed the itch to perform and often times ran away from home at age 14 to join circuses, minstrel shows and medicine shows. From these escapades, he sharpened his comic skills and developed routines and acts that eventually made a mark on the vaudeville stage, or what was then called the "chitlin' circuit." A solo performer by nature, he often teamed up with other famous comics (such as Ben Carter) to keep working, and became a deft performer of "indefinite talk" routines, wherein two quicksilver comics continually topped each other in mid-sentence, as if reading each other's mind (i.e., "Say, did you see...?" "Saw him just yesterday...did't look so good"). In 1927, he found work as a comedian in "Connie's Inn Frolics" in Harlem and worked steadily in the musical revue "Blackbirds of 1928" for ,
Mantan's focus and interest gradually shifted toward film, where he would appear in servile bits (butlers, shoeshine men, porters, chauffeurs, janitors, waiters, elevator operators). He made his film debut paired with one of his vaudeville partners, F.E. Miller (aka Flournoy Miller), in the one-reel short That's the Spirit (1933) as frightened night watchmen in a haunted pawn shop. His talent for making people laugh was not to be overlooked and he soon earned featured status in such Harlem-styled western parodies as Harlem on the Prairie (1937) and Two-Gun Man from Harlem (1938).
Mantan managed to find a niche for himself in mainstream comedies of the late 1930's and 1940's playing the pop-eyed, superstitious, highly perceptive manservant running away from impending doom -- Millionaire Playboy (1940), Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery (1941), Cracked Nuts (1941), Revenge of the Zombies (1943) and the serial Mystery of the River Boat (1944). He had more prominence appearing as a corner ring man for a boxing story, played by real-life boxing champ Joe Louis and providing comedy relief along with Shemp Howard in the mystery horror opus The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (1942). He was occasionally given stereotyped ne-er-do-well leads in such vehicles as One Dark Night (1939) and Up Jumped the Devil (1941) and the musical short Tall, Tan, and Terrific (1946). He later starred in two self-named vehicles for Lucky Productions -- Mantan Messes Up (1946) and Mantan Runs for Mayor (1946).
The comic actor also teamed up (as a character named "Jefferson") with a young, pint-sized white actor Frankie Darro in seven adventure comedies for Monogram Pictures -- Irish Luck (1939), Chasing Trouble (1940), On the Spot (1940), Laughing at Danger (1940), Up in the Air (1940), You're Out of Luck (1941) and The Gang's All Here (1941). Monogram later utilized his talents as chauffeur Birmingham Brown as comedy relief in 15 of the "Charlie Chan" mystery whoddunits beginning opposite Charlie Chan #2, Sidney Toler in Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944), and ending opposite Charlie Chan #3 Episode #1.51 (2004) in The Sky Dragon (1949).
Although haunted mansions were an ideal place for setting off his stereotyped character, Mantan would be haunted in a different way by this Hollywood success in years to follow. By the 1950s, racial attitudes began to change and, with the rise of the civil rights movement in the mid 1960's, what was once considered hilarious was now interpreted as offensive. Mantan and others, such as Stepin Fetchit, were unfairly ostracized and ridiculed by Hollywood for their past negative portrayals and lost work.
In the late 1960s he managed a modest resurgence on TV and in commercials and occasional films, allowing him to work again with such comic heavyweights as Bill Cosby, Godfrey Cambridge and director Carl Reiner. He appeared in bit parts on such shows as "Julia," "The Bill Cosby Show," "Adam-12" and "Love, American Style." His later could be glimpsed in such films as The Patsy (1964), Enter Laughing (1967), the cult film Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told (1967) and Watermelon Man (1970). His final movie was a bit part as an old man in The Young Nurses (1973).
His return was all too brief, however, for Mantan, long suffering from ill health, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on September 28, 1973, just as he was starting to settle into working again. Today, audiences tend to be kinder and more understanding of Moreland, remembering him as a highly talented comic who, in the only way he knew, broke major barriers and opened the doors for others black actors to follow.- Actor
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Spencer Tracy was the second son born on April 5, 1900, to truck salesman John Edward and Caroline Brown Tracy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While attending Marquette Academy, he and classmate Pat O'Brien quit school to enlist in the Navy at the start of World War I. Tracy was still at Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia at the end of the war. After playing the lead in the play "The Truth" at Ripon College he decided that acting might be his career.
Moving to New York, Tracy and O'Brien, who'd also settled on a career on the stage, roomed together while attending the Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1923 both got nonspeaking parts as robots in "R.U.R.", a dramatization of the groundbreaking science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Capek. Making very little money in stock, Tracy supported himself with jobs as bellhop, janitor and salesman until John Ford saw his critically acclaimed performance in the lead role in the play "The Last Mile" (later played on film by Clark Gable) and signed him for The William Fox Film Company's production of Up the River (1930). Despite appearing in sixteen films at that studio over the next five years, Tracy was never able to rise to full film star status there, in large part because the studio was unable to match his talents to suitable story material.
During that period the studio itself floundered, eventually merging with Darryl F. Zanuck, Joseph Schenck and William Goetz's William 20th Century Pictures to become 20th Century-Fox). In 1935 Tracy signed with MGM under the aegis of Irving Thalberg and his career flourished. He became the first actor to win back-to-back Best Actor Oscars for Captains Courageous (1937) and, in a project he initially didn't want to star in, Boys Town (1938).
During Tracy's nearly forty-year film career, he was nominated for his performances in San Francisco (1936), Father of the Bride (1950), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).
Tracy had a brief romantic relationship with Loretta Young in the mid-1930s, and a lifelong one with Katharine Hepburn beginning in 1942 after they were first paired in Woman of the Year by director George Stevens. Tracy's strong Roman Catholic beliefs precluded his divorcing wife Louise, though they mostly lived apart. Tracy suffered from severe alcoholism and diabetes (from the late 1940s), which led to his declining several tailor-made roles in films that would become big hits with other actors in those roles. Although his drinking problems were well known, he was considered peerless among his colleagues (Tracy had a well-deserved reputation for keeping co-stars on their toes for his oddly endearing scene-stealing tricks), and remained in demand as a senior statesman who nevertheless retained box office clout. Two weeks after completion of Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), during which he suffered from lung congestion, Spencer Tracy died of a heart attack.