The Lonely, Triumphant Careers of Billy Barty and Franklin Pangborn

I technically have been working on The Fractured Mirror book since 2015. That’s the year I began writing the TCM Backlot column I would spin off into the new book from Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place/Declan-Haven publishing. 

But I only decided to turn The Fractured Mirror in the last two years. For the last year or so I have been grinding away at the enormous amount of labor involved with putting a five hundred or six hundred page book about a century of film history. 

It’s been My Year of American Movies About the Film Industry. It’s been a glorious adventure. I’m nowhere near finished. 

Over the course of the last fifty two weeks or so I have been diving DEEP into the history of American film. It has been wonderful in part because I see the same themes and names pop up over and over again and it’s my job as a pop culture writer to recognize, understand and explain these recurring motifs and familiar names. 

Burt Reynolds is the movie star most represented in The Fractured Mirror and I haven’t even gotten to writing about Boogie Nights yet because the icon of stoic, gum-chewing American masculinity was fascinated by the business and made a series of films where he played actors, stuntmen, pornographers, film producers and other movie world folks. 

On the character actor side, it sure feels like Billy Barty and Franklin Pangborn appeared in every damn movie I write about in The Fractured Mirror. That’s because these two beloved fixtures of film history completely owned cinematic archetypes for DECADES, not just years. 

For a seeming half century if a Hollywood movie had a role for a little person Barty was the little person they cast. Barty’s career began in the silent era, with a series of short films based on a character from The Toonerville Trolley comic strip that paired Barty with a fellow diminutive giant of the silver screen: Mickey Rooney. 

A series of appearances in classic films followed, some uncredited. Decades into his extraordinary career as the most prolific little person actor in film history Barty was still playing roles like “Clarinetist Inside Tuba” and “Little Clown Jumping Out of a Firehouse.”

Over the course of his seven decades in the business Barty wracked up two hundred and thirteen Internet MovieDatabase credits. Barty was unofficially Hollywood’s official little person actor, to the point where it felt like he monopolized little people roles. 

With the exception of The Terror of Tinytown, there were generally one or no roles for little people actors in film and television. That left room for Barty to work constantly in myriad mediums and seemingly no one else. 

When Hollywood made a movie with a cast composed largely of little people, Barty unsurprisingly had one of the biggest, most important roles. 

Unfortunately the ensuing film, 1981’s Under the Rainbow was less a milestone for little people in entertainment than one long, vulgar joke with little people as the incoherent, unfunny punchline. 

I don’t remember much about Barty’s role in the film, which is of course covered in The Fractured Mirror but I do remember that he plays a Nazi agent who accidentally punches Hitler in the dick while saluting. 

I wonder sometimes how Barty felt about the fact that he got so much work while his fellow little person actors got so little. Being THE little person actor for a very long period of time had to be a strange and lonely as well as comfortable life. 

In that respect Barty occupied a place not dissimilar from that of Franklin Pangborn. If I remember correctly Pangborn is referenced in The Celluloid Closet (which I will write about for The Fractured Mirror as well) as embodying the sturdy cinematic archetype of “The Sissy.” 

For decades if you had a role that called for a character the audience would know was gay without it being established through dialogue you cast Pangborn in the role. 

Just as Barty monopolized little people roles for ages, Pangborn had a lock on roles that called for a stuffy, uptight effeminate homosexual.

It’s easy to see why Pangborn worked constantly and in some of the greatest movies of all time. He was an essential member of Preston Sturges’ repertory company and scored a staggering two hundred and forty one credits between 1926’s The Jelly Fish and 1958’s The Red Skelton Show. 

Pangborn was a comic genius, the perfect comic foil to inveterate anarchists like W.C. Fields. Fields was able to choose the cast for Never Give a Sucker an Even Break so he unsurprisingly cast Pangborn as the producer he pitching a film to. 

Fields’ original screenplay for Never Give a Sucker an Even Break was apparently way too ribald and course for censors. Among the many things they objected to was Fields calling Pangborn a “pansy.” 

To make things even more awkward, in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, Pangborn’s character is credited as Mr. Pangborn, lest audiences be confused as to the exact nature of the role. 

When Never Give a Sucker an Even Break was released it was of course devoid of anti-gay slurs but the mere fact that Fields wrote the part and the dialogue for Pangborn illustrates how excessively comfortable he was treating Pangborn not just as a joke but a homophobic one as well. 

Pangborn was briefly an announcer on Jack Pair’s The Tonight Show but, according to Wikipedia was fired for “a lack of "spontaneous enthusiasm.” 

It’s fun and easy to imagine Pangborn suffering silently through Parr’s late-night antics with a scowl on his face. 

Pangborn died at 69 in 1958, a decade before a cultural revolution in LGTBQ representation. Like Barty his career had elements of tragedy as well as triumph because he also was such a solitary figure, both in terms of being the only (implicitly) gay character in a particular film and being one of the only gay actors to work constantly throughout the heyday of Old Hollywood without hiding their homosexuality or pretending to be straight. 

Then again, Pangborn and Barty were pioneers and the existential lot of every pioneer is inherently lonely because they’re paving the way for progress and representation to come. 

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