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Otherwise, Bannerline is notable only for a distinction that has given a lift to scores of its predecessors on the B-picture assembly line: another fine performance by Character Actor J. Carrol Naish. As he has many times before, Actor Naish plays the menace, an Italian-American gangster. This one takes pride in his rise from a slum to become a silent senior partner of politicians; he has his own sense of fair play as well as foul, and there is enough mellowness in his menace to make him a semicomic figure. Naish's creative playing progressively fills out his sketchy role until the gangster becomes the film's most convincing human being and, curiously, its most likable character.
In his 21-year Hollywood career, Carrol Patrick Sarsfield Joseph Naish, 51, has never once been starred. But he has worked steadily, profitably and to the consistent pleasure of moviegoers in so many films that he has lost count. His conservative guess: 125.
Though he is a native New Yorker of Irish ancestry, his dark eyes, swarthy skin and gift for accents have kept him busiest playing Latin types. He has also appeared as an Englishman, an ape, an old woman, a Swede, a Negro, an Indian, a Japanese, a Malayan, a Chinese, a Pole. On Broadway, before he went to Hollywood, he once played a rabbi in the evening while rehearsing in the afternoon as a Greek gangster. On neither stage nor screen has Naish ever played an Irishman.
Naish entered show business in his teens as a song plugger for Irving Berlin. At 17 he enlisted in World War I, and enjoyed an unruly military career as bombardier, naval orderly and Army machine gunner. After the war he stayed on in Europe, knocking around the Continent as a variety-hall clown and soldier of fortune. The European years fed his talent for mimicry, and left him fluent in five languages and competent in three others. He was on a slow boat to Shanghai when a storm at sea diverted him to Hollywood in 1927. After three years on Broadway and the road, he settled down in the movies.
Twice nominated for an Academy Award (for an Italian soldier in 1943's Sahara and the Mexican father in 1945's A Medal for Benny), Naish has been under contract to a studio only once, to Paramount in 1938. Since then he has freelanced, turning down half a dozen contract offers and as many chances to get star billing. "I like to go after roles," he says, "and when you're under contract, you've got to do what they want you to do." His next part: in RKO's forthcoming Clash by Night, as a plain, unhyphenated American—a major change of pace for Hollywood's one-man U.N.