Alan Hale — Another Villain Reforms (1928) 🇺🇸

At what stage of his life does a villain become a comedian? This has become an interesting question in the studios.

Wallace Beery has arrived at the goal in the years of his maturity as an actor. And so has Raymond Hatton, and more recently George Bancroft. In The Patent Leather Kid Matthew Betz, one of the most menacing of bad men, showed a rare flash of humor.

Quite as strikingly as any of these, Alan Hale [Alan Hale Sr.] proves that an accumulation of years spent in films, adds considerably to one’s gift of comedy.

Hardly more than a year ago, Hale scored a brilliant hit as a roystering sea captain in Beatrice Joy’s “Vanity.” He was the life of the production, which wasn’t, perhaps, one of the season’s outstanding features. He followed this with another mirth-maker of the sea, in The Wreck of the Hesperus, and more recently played a comic heavy in The Leopard Lady, with Jacqueline Logan.

Hale has personality and is versatile. He likes directing better than acting, but every time he gets a start with the megaphone, somebody selects him for a rôle that is not to be ignored. So his dream can’t be realized, except spasmodically.

No one needs to be told that Hale’s first work in pictures goes back almost to the beginning of film history, when he did slapstick, went through, the Griffith school [D. W. Griffith], and performed all other traditional duties which served then to establish a player as one of the true old-timers.

Curiously enough, he is still only in his middle thirties. That is because his stage début was made at nineteen years of age.

The pictures that Hale is chiefly remembered by, include The Covered Wagon, The Four Horsemen, in which he played the German father, and Robin Hood.

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1928