LYLE TALBOT
February 8th, 1902 -- March 2nd, 1996

Above: Lyle Talbot in a publicity photo taken sometime (I'd guess) in the mid-forties.

Gifted with intelligent, dignified features and a commanding baritone voice, Lyle Talbot was completely believable in whatever serial villain role he tackled. Co-founder of the Screen Actor's Guild and at one time a major contractee at Warner Brothers, his business-like, no-nonsense approach made him a natural for playing foreign spy leaders in TRADER TOM OF THE CHINA SEAS and MYSTERY OF THE RIVER BOAT, as he ordered his lesser agents on their missions with curt dispatch. He excelled in other villainous roles, too, from the mad scientist Lex Luthor in the second Superman serial, to a modern day Western outlaw leader in THE VIGILANTE. He brought an air of suave, quiet menace to his heavies that was fully as threatening as the more overt evil of Bela Lugosi or Lionel Atwill. Whatever role Talbot played, you got the impression that this handsome, quiet man meant business in everything he did--and when he was playing a villain--look out! He could be positively deadly, both to the good guys and his own henchmen.

We tend to forget it today, but Talbot was quite a major actor in the early thirties. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but his parent hailed from Mississippi, where they had been showboat entertainers. He followed in their footsteps at an early age, performing a traveling magician act while still a teenager. Clearly, Lyle was born to go into acting (his middle name actually was Hollywood--he had been born Lyle Hollywood Henderson). He adapted Talbot as his stage name early on in his career and played in several Southern repertory companies. By the mid- twenties he had formed his own company in Memphis: the Talbot Players. He came to Hollywood just as talkies were arriving, and, with his distinctive, cultured voice, quickly was signed to a contract by Warner Brothers. He acted alongside the likes of Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy (20,000 YEARS IN SING SING), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (THE LIFE OF JIMMY DOLAN), and Ginger Rogers (THE THIRTEENTH GUEST, A SHRIEK IN THE NIGHT) during this period--in major roles, too. He left Warners in 1937 and began freelancing, working in big, little, and medium-sized films, sometimes as the lead (WHAT PRICE VENGEANCE), sometimes as a heavy (THEY RAID BY NIGHT), but always standing out in the cast. His roles began to drop in importance by the early forties, and in 1944 he entered the world of the serial as Rudolph Toller in one of Universal Pictures' last serials, MYSTERY OF THE RIVER BOAT. The serial was set in the modern-day Louisiana bayous, and, like many of Universal's later serials, RIVER BOAT was incredibly complicated plot-wise. Talbot's character, Toller, was a foreign spy after swampland property containing vast deposits of a liquid element called nitrolene. Talbot, however, was only one of the many plotters and counter-plotters in the serial. To begin with, there were the three feuding families--the Perrins, headed by heroine Marjory Clements and her father Oscar O'Shea, the Duvals, headed by Earle Hodgins, and the Langtrys, headed by hero Robert Lowery. These three families owned the valuable land. In addition, the serial featured a villainous geologist (Ian Wolfe), a murderous black-sheep member of the Duval family (Arthur Hohl), and a shifty Cajun swamp rat (Francis McDonald), all up to their own skulduggery. It was a credit to Talbot's screen presence that he managed to make his role be even noticed among such a huge cast

Above, from left to right: Robert Lowery, Lyle Talbot, Mantan Moreland, and Joe E. Devlin in MYSTERY OF THE RIVERBOAT (Universal, 1944).

Talbot's second serial was also his last starring film; unfortunately, it gave him little to do, even though he was top-billed. CHICK CARTER DETECTIVE (Columbia, 1946), featured Talbot as the title sleuth, but only allowed him to participate in two cliffhanger endings and virtually no fights; all the more active work was handled by his reporter friend Rusty (Douglas Fowley). Perhaps producer Sam Katzman thought Talbot was too old and too portly to portray a leading hero, but Lyle's acting talent could have overcame such handicaps. Still, Talbot was the official star, and was the one who unraveled the serial's plot, a complex mystery involving a stolen diamond, a gangster (George Meeker), and a shady nightclub singer (Julie Gibson). The serial has its fans, but was not a faithful adaptation of the pulp character it was supposed to be based on (the pulp Chick was in actuality a teenager).

Above: Lyle Talbot, far left, questions gangster George Meeker, second from left, while a police detective (Eddie Parker) holds on to nightclub owner Charles King. This still is from CHICK CARTER DETECTIVE (Columbia, 1946).

Lyle's next Columbia serial, 1947's THE VIGILANTE, cast him as a heavy again. Based on the Action Comics character, THE VIGILANTE was a contemporary Western-mystery featuring excellent serial hero Ralph Byrd as Greg Saunders, a B-western movie star who assumes the identity of the masked Vigilante to combat crime. Saunders and his sidekick Stuff (George Offerman Jr.) find a big mystery on their hands when the various owners of several prize Arabanian stallions, which have been given as gifts by a visiting Asian potentate (Robert Barron), are victimized by a gang of vicious gangsters who for some reason are bent on collecting all the horses. George Pierce (Talbot) a seemingly friendly nightclub owner, is the real brains of the bad guys, and manages to keep himself from being implicated in his gang's crimes until he is exposed at the end. It was an excellent role for Talbot, allowing him to be alternately ruthless and jovial by turns; the serial itself is also supposed to be a high-quality cliffhanger and has developed a loyal fan following among serial devotees. It sounds good; I'll have to see it soon.

Above: A portrait of Lyle Talbot as George Pierce in THE VIGILANTE (Columbia, 1947).

With one exception, all of Talbot's remaining serials would be made at Columbia. His next outing was BATMAN AND ROBIN (Columbia, 1949), as Commissioner Gordon, who calls on the Dynamic Duo to help him combat the Wizard, a mystery criminal after a powerful remote control device. Though he rarely left his office and seemed to depend entirely on Batman and Robin, Lyle still succeeded in making Gordon seem like a competent, efficient law officer (in fact, he was the first actor to play the role), and raised the production values of the Katzman-produced serial considerably.

Above: Commissioner Gordon (Lyle Talbot, at desk) mulls over a problem as his own personal task-force, Batman (Robert Lowery) and Robin (John Duncan) enter through the window.

Lyle's next serial was also a comic book based one, and gave him his best cliffhanger role as well. ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN (Columbia, 1950), was a well-done sequel to Columbia's equally good SUPERMAN (Columbia, 1948), and it featured Talbot as Superman's arch enemy, the bald-headed mad scientist Lex Luthor (again, Talbot was the first to play the role of this well-known comic book character). Luthor, ostensibly reformed and running a TV station, donned the guise of Atom Man to continue his criminal activities and gave the Man of Steel (Kirk Alyn) a tough fight with the help of his arsenal of scientific gadgets, ranging from a teleportation ray to synthetic Kryptonite. Talbot took an unexpected and very effective approach to the role of Luthor; instead of playing him as a bug-eyed, cackling ghoul, he gave the character's most loopy utterances perfectly sane delivery, making the mad scientist a lot more frightening in the process. Talbot's Luthor was completely inverted: sane in his madness. Talbot also was able to give complete credence to Luthor's pretended reformation, and affected a heavy foreign accent as the mysterious Atom Man, playing in effect a triple role. This tour-de-force performance was Lyle's masterpiece, his best serial villain performance and one of the most memorable villains created for a serial.

Above: Don Harvey (left) and Lyle Talbot work the mysterious teleportation ray in this lobby card for ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN (Columbia, 1950), which featured Lyle as Superman's arch nemesis, the deranged scientist Lex Luthor.

Talbot's next three serials all gave him "chief operative" type roles along the lines of his Commissioner Gordon part. In SON OF GERONIMO (Columbia, 1952), starring Clayton Moore, he played Army Colonel Foster; in THE GREAT ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN KIDD (Columbia, 1953), with Richard Crane and John Crawford, he appeared uncredited as a British naval officer; and in GUNFIGHTERS OF THE NORTHWEST (Columbia, 1953), he played Inspector Wheeler, commanding officer to heroes Jock Mahoney and Clayton Moore. This last part was the biggest of the three, but none of them were particularly meaty roles; Lyle, however, did a solid, commanding job in each one.

Above: Lyle Talbot, right, looks out of a stagecoach window in SON OF GERONIMO (Columbia, 1952).

Above, from left to right: Clayton Moore, Jock Mahoney, and Lyle Talbot in GUNFIGHTERS OF THE NORTHWEST (Columbia, 1954).

Talbot's final serial was made for Republic Pictures--1954's TRADER TOM OF THE CHINA SEAS. Befitting his last cliffhanger, he was once again the chief heavy, a retired shipping magnate named Barent who was secretly masterminding a revolution to overthrow the Khan of the island nation of Burmatra and make the country a satellite of the Soviet Union. Talbot left all the rough stuff to his henchman Fred Graham, who was foiled at every turn by hero Tom Rogers and heroine Vivian Wells (Harry Lauter and Aline Towne). Towards the end of the serial, Talbot took matters into his own hands and nearly outwitted the good guys by pretending to help them in their search for Graham; in fact, hero Lauter wasn't aware of Talbot's villainy until he engaged him in the serial's final fistfight. A colorful cliffhanger with an above-average amount of imagination for a late Republic, TRADER TOM hearkened back to Republic's glory days, and provided a good farewell vehicle for Talbot after eleven great years in the serial field.

Above: A great color lobby card for TRADER TOM OF THE CHINA SEAS (Republic, 1954), Lyle Talbot's last serial and probably the last great Republic serial. Harry Lauter and Aline Towne are shown in the bottom right hand corner; above them is Lyle Talbot, issuing orders to his henchmen via radio. In the upper left hand corner, Lauter grapples with Tom Steele. Below him, Fred Graham and a rebel native pose for action, and, below them, Victor Sen Yung is pictured as Lauter's houseboy. In the left hand photo under the title, Lauter and Towne attempt to save a wrecked ship, and in the other photo under the title, Graham confers with rebel leader Richard Reeves (in black).

After appearing in a variety of vehicles, including some of Ed Wood's so-bad-they're-good flicks like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, Lyle made his last movie, SUNRISE AT CAMPOBELLO, in 1960. However, he found a whole second career on TV, playing the running role of the Nelsons' neighbor Joe Randolph for fourteen years on THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET, as well as the part of Bob Cummings' pal on the shorter-lived BOB CUMMINGS SHOW. In addition to these regular roles, he appeared in guest spots on nearly every other TV show made, including THE GENE AUTRY SHOW, THE LONE RANGER, RIN-TIN-TIN, MAVERICK, and LEAVE IT TO BEAVER (he made two appearances on this show, both times playing Mr. Denison, father of one of Beaver's classmates. Interestingly, his young son Stephen became a regular on the show as Beaver's friend Gilbert). He also played a semi-recurring role on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, as Army Colonel Blake. He continued to appear on the tube till the mid-eighties, and died at the ripe old age of 94 in 1996.

As the only great serial villain to do the majority of his work after the serials started their decline, Lyle Talbot helped to make latter-day classics of many cliffhangers that may not have been as good without him (ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN, TRADER TOM OF THE CHINA SEAS, THE VIGILANTE). The boy magician, youthful repertory performer, and Actor's Guild founder all fused into a multi-talented performer in those wonderful serials--Lyle Talbot, the man whose middle name was Hollywood.

Above: Lyle, seated, ticks off his henchmen for failure in ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN (Columbia, 1950). Talbot's criminal cohorts are, from left to right, Rusty Westcoatt, Terry Frost, Jack Ingram, and Don C. Harvey.