The Curious Career of James Craig

James Craig’s Hollywood career has been reduced to so many apocryphal stories, it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. His IMDb bio insists that “tall, rugged James Craig's career as an MGM contract player blossomed in the 1940s. This was due in large part to his strong physical and vocal resemblance to the studio’s top leading man, Clark Gable.” That would all be well and good — if any of it were true. Craig sounded nothing like Gable; they spoke at different speeds, in different registers, and Craig (born in Nashville in 1912, more than a decade after Gable) had a Southern drawl to boot. As for looks, he sported a mustache in quite a few screen roles — but do we see any other similarities? In the eyes? In the cheekbones? In the shape of the face? This is what happens when you take an oft-repeated story — in this case, that MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer saw a resemblance to Clark Gable and thought Craig would be a suitable fill-in while his star was off fighting the Nazis — and accept it as fact. And indeed, Mayer may well have thought Craig looked and even sounded like Gable, but let’s get real — if you look at the world through the eyes of Louis B. Mayer, you’ll start to believe all kinds of things that aren’t true: that Hitler was harmless, that teenaged Judy Garland enjoyed being groped, and that film stars worked best pumped up on amphetamines.

But still, you see Craig everywhere dismissed as “the poor man’s Clark Gable.” Classic film fans love to dump on Craig; he inspires an uncommon level of hostility. Let’s look at a smattering of comments, shall we?

“A second string Clark Gable wannabe.” — jjnxn-1, IMDb

“I’m not a fan of James Craig’s... and to be even more brutal, I’m perplexed as to how he ever had a movie career in the first place.” — Ivan G. Shreve Jr., Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

“Gives a typically wooden performance.” — jacobs-greenwood, IMDb

“Forgettable James Craig, one of those guys who’s done dozens of western roles but never seems to stand out in any of them.” — zsenorsock, IMDb

“A poor man’s Clark Gable” — Jeff Arnold, Jeff Arnold’s West

“James Craig must be the worst actor ever to work in Hollywood.” — howdymax, IMDb

The man who made striking, lasting impressions in three Oscar-winning films in four years (Kitty Foyle, The Devil and Daniel Webster and The Human Comedy) was most assuredly not “the worst actor ever to work in Hollywood,” so what accounts for the dismissal and derision? Well, a couple things. Because Craig had no intention of being in pictures until he took a trip to Los Angeles and decided to try his hand at acting, it’s easy to presume that he wasn’t very good; after all, he lacked the drive and training of his colleagues. But sometimes raw talent and sound instincts are all you need to score it big in Tinseltown. Because in literary circles, Craig is best remembered for his many mentions in Gore Vidal’s satiric novel Myra Breckinridge (because the book’s eponymous heroine worshiped Classic Hollywood, seeing it as the pinnacle of Western culture, and lusted after Craig, her favorite celebrity), he’s come to be seen by some as more of a punchline than a performer. And of course the Clark Gable nonsense — which has persisted for over 3/4 of a century — is the nail in the coffin. It encourages lazy writers to dismiss him as a pale imitation of a beloved actor, and prompts Gable devotees to take him down a peg or two, as if he were a determined usurper to the throne.

But none of those reasons get to the heart of the matter — or to what’s remarkable about Craig’s career. Something went very wrong for a performer who had genuine presence and promise — something not unheard of in the heyday of the studio system, but uncommon enough to merit a closer look. The simple truth is that MGM — once they signed Craig in 1943 — fumbled his career; that’s the part of the James Craig story that doesn’t get told. Conventional wisdom has it that his career came to life at Metro (it “blossomed” there, as IMDb puts it), when in fact, his image — and ultimately his career — died there. MGM might have boasted “more stars than there are in the heavens,” but it was also capable of losing track of a star — or snuffing it out entirely. James Craig had one of the most startling career trajectories in Hollywood history; he was both made and broken by the studio system — and in just under five years. Is that some kind of record?

After that fateful trip to LA in the late ’30s when he was bitten by the movie bug, Craig returned to Houston to hone his newly-chosen craft onstage. A year later, he made his way back to Hollywood, where he was screen tested and signed by Paramount. And after a few bit parts, he landed his first credited role, in Paramount’s THUNDER TRAIL. (With Craig films that I feel are worth a look, I’ll put them in bold and all caps; most are readily available for rental or streaming.) It’s only his third screen appearance, but he struck gold, landing the fifth lead in a solid adaptation of a Zane Grey short story. At a time when Westerns were largely seen as lightweight entertainment — kiddie fare — Variety cheered, “That rarity, a well-made western, Thunder Trail carries adult as well as juve appeal.” The trade praised it as a film with an “absorbing story, plenty of action and a capable cast with sufficient name draws.” By the 1950’s, Craig — verging on has-been status — would find himself saddled with a string of lousy oaters. Ironically, he began his career with one of his best. It’s a story of two brothers separated as youths — whom fate reconnects decades later, now on opposite sides of the law — and although Craig is far out-acted by onscreen sibling Gilbert Roland, you already see the talent and the potential. And good instincts, which compensate for his lack of polish. The film was a hit, but Paramount had no particular plans for Craig. After suffering through five more bit parts, he left Hollywood to seek some cachet in New York City, landing his one and only Broadway role, in E.B. Ginty’s Missouri Legend: a comic retelling of the Jesse James legend that — despite a rave from Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times — ran only a month. Craig had a supporting role, but his gamble paid off: a Columbia Pictures talent scout saw him and signed him. (And his experience yielded even greater dividends nearly a decade later, when the play was adapted for the screen, and Craig was offered the lead.)

Columbia might have feigned enthusiasm about the 27-year-old newcomer, but they used him mostly as a utility player. He appeared in 21 films for Columbia in 1939; his “roles” included Logger, Reporter, 1st Attendant, 2nd Reporter, Detective, 2nd Detective, Swindler Driving Car and two stints as Party Guest — all of them, of course, uncredited. His contract was picked up late that year by Universal, which barely did better by him; his Universal roles included Brenda’s Friend, Federal Agent Posing as Drunk, and the well-remembered Reporter Ernest Gives Notes To. But he managed second billing in two Universal films: South to Karanga and Zanzibar. Both are B movies set in Africa — one a train-bound murder mystery, the other a “jungle expedition” adventure serial — and both are tough to revisit; the racist overtones are undeniable and occasionally blinding. But Craig has ease and command and good looks to spare. How much else remains to be determined, but when he tells star Lola Lane in Zanzibar (at the end of a hair-raising journey), “It’s been a swell outing. I’ve enjoyed every moment of it,” you believe him. His zealousness lends unexpected credibility to the proceedings. He has a zest for life lived on the edge and — when it’s called for — a lust for love. In his early years, his most common tic is a right upper lip that seems to rise on its own whenever he gets excited, as if his cockeyed worldview sets his features equally off-balance. His inflections and tone are appealing: a little glib, and maybe a little smug — but when he flashes that crooked half-smile, you forgive him anything.

After three years in Hollywood, and nearly forty screen appearances — most of them bit parts — Craig got offered his best role since Thunder Trail. RKO needed someone to essay the second male lead in their 1940 Oscar hopeful KITTY FOYLE: someone so engaging that he could wrest the leading lady away from her star-crossed romance. They borrowed Craig from Universal, and he delivered in spades.

So let’s talk about Kitty Foyle, in which Ginger Rogers abandons everything that’s singular and appealing about herself and wins an Oscar. In which she trades her customary smarts and sass for sincerity and gullibility, qualities apparently designed to make her closer to an Everywoman. As the second male lead who miraculously manages to win Rogers at the end, Craig is quirky and funny and insistent — and you can’t quite get a read on him. Is he a smartaleck with a good heart, or an eccentric with appealing moments of clarity? Whatever he is, he feels like an original, and far more vital than anyone else in this lugubrious film. The screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Donald Ogden Stewart — a formidable pair, mind you — postures it’s a tragic romance between a love-struck pair (middle-class Ginger Rogers and upper-crust Dennis Morgan) whom society keeps apart, but it’s not that at all; it’s the story of a spoiled, selfish man-child who can’t bear to part with his money. Midway through, when Rogers and Morgan have run off and eloped, his tyrannical family threatens to cut him off unless he takes over the family business. Rogers proceeds to tell them off — she married a man and not his money, and they’ll get by anywhere, as long as they’re together. And then, in the very next scene, she turns around and advises Morgan that he could never be happy living a life like hers — crowded into a tiny apartment, going to the movies just once a week — and makes the ultimate sacrifice, walking out on him and leaving him to his minions and his millions. (It’s one of the most transparent pieces of Oscar bait ever put on the screen; if her outrage doesn’t nab her the trophy, we’ll make her noble, too.)

Craig appears onscreen no more than a handful of times — almost an afterthought. He’s a New York City med student whom Rogers meets cute while working as a saleswoman. The screenplay spans just over a decade, and Craig appears only once in the last five years — and that’s at the very start of the film, before it dissolves into a giant flashback. (No legitimate suitor was ever given less suitable screentime.) Yet the fact that the audience still cheers Rogers’ decision to run off with Craig at the end is a mark of the impression he leaves. Audiences took to him at once; they didn’t want her with the snobbish fop she’d spent 90% of the movie insisting was her destiny. They wanted him with the good doctor — who was giving the kind of performance they were expecting from Rogers. Craig in Kitty Foyle has got that slightly sardonic, know-it-all quality you associate with Rogers; her energy emerged as snark, his as irreverence — and unquestionably a reason the film works for audiences is because you fully understand why she chooses to marry Craig at the end, because they’ll be perfect together. She’ll go and turn into Ginger Rogers again.

Kitty Foyle was a megahit, and RKO knew what they had in Craig. Their publicity machine went into overdrive, trumpeting his athleticism (“Craig built up his towering physique as a footballer in college [and] nearly became a prizefighter”), his appeal (“brown-haired, brown-eyed ….. tall, rugged, essentially masculine”) and his modesty. (“Craig’s own reaction to this swift popularity is characteristic. He thinks he has been incredibly lucky.”) And they announced he’d be paired next with Anne Shirley, in a romantic comedy set in Palm Beach, with her as a poor shopgirl and him as a wealthy industrialist — and with Charles Coburn playing fairy godmother. The forgotten UNEXPECTED UNCLE suffers from some awkwardness to keep the plot in motion: mostly the fact that she doesn’t seem to fully understand the kind of pressure he’s under — running his late father’s business, and hating every moment of it. (Everyone else knows, but no one gets around to telling her.) But Charles Coburn is as disarming as ever (a trailer park resident bluffing his way into high society) and Craig and Shirley make an appealing pair — plus there’s marvelous support from Renee Godfrey and Russell Gleason, two of the best friends any screen couple ever had. (Renee was married to the film’s director. Peter Godfrey, and her velvety delivery neatly balances Shirley’s reedy, animated one. It’s refreshing to see a woman in a romantic comedy of this era turn up as the lead’s ex and not serve as a romantic rival — merely a supportive friend and a mouthpiece for exposition. Perhaps because of her presence on the set, I think Unexpected Uncle is the best comedy Peter Godfrey ever directed.)

Craig’s inflections are every bit as surprising as in Kitty Foyle. (He calls Shirley “funny bunny,” and you’d swear there’s a crack in his voice each time he does.) At times, he almost seems to be daring you to decipher him. You can’t tell if it’s a lack of training or a disregard for convention, but coming from a town where performances too often feel manufactured, that’s one thing James Craig doesn't feel. He doesn’t seem like a product of the studio system. When he has too much to drink while dining out with Shirley, and picks a fight, he doesn't go the expected route: he doesn't lose control, then pull back for dramatic effect. He keeps it at one pitch, and it could come off as amateur — but his artlessness wins you over. He doesn't feel like he's doing an “angry drunk” routine. He just seems angry and drunk. That lack of affectation lifted Craig’s earliest performances. He became a cleverer actor over time, but in his best roles, he retains the rawness he had when he first arrived in town, convinced he could succeed as well as the next guy. He was like a kid with a new toy he couldn’t wait to try out, except he didn’t want to read the instructions before he played with it. And that quality makes Unexpected Uncle — the story of a poor little rich boy — an ideal vehicle for him.

The good roles kept coming, and in important pictures. Director William Dieterle had set up his own production company, and signed a distribution deal with RKO; as he cast his first film, THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER, it was only natural that he would search the company roster for talent, and that led him to Craig. In The Devil and Daniel Webster, Craig is Jabez Stone, a New Hampshire farmer in 1841 who sells his soul for seven years of success. Based on the novel by Stephen Vincent Benet, the film adaptation seems tailor-made for Craig; he perfectly conveys the make-up of a man who grows so aggravated with life‘s injustices that he willingly brokers a deal with the devil. Whenever things don’t go his way, Jabez swears, “Consarn it!” It’s, of course, the film’s way of getting profanity past the censors, but it sounds so very right coming from Craig — like he’s still testing out what sort of cuss words he can get away with before his mother reprimands him. (His mother is Jane Darwell; she reprimands him often.) The impudence that distinguishes so many of Craig's early performances works beautifully for him here. Stone — like so many of his neighbors — has a failing farm, but unlike them, he lacks the patience to weather life’s literal and figurative storms; he wants the shortcuts. No wonder Oscar nominee Walter Huston — a devil in a deerstalker hat and goatee — chooses him as his next mark: he's a perfect candidate for corruption.

Craig’s Jabez Stone is very much a “man’s man” — a rugged farmer you can imagine plowing the earth, or leaping across fields to secure a stray animal. But for all the hardships he faces, Jabez’s 27-year-old face seems unblemished; Dieterle goes for a lot of tight close-ups that accentuate Craig’s ingenuousness. The first time the name of statesman and lawyer Daniel Webster is invoked, Craig’s jaw drops in admiration — “They say when he speaks, the stars and stripes come right out of the sky” — and he looks like a kid fawning over his favorite baseball player. When everyone’s harvest is destroyed in a hailstorm except his own, he gloats like the lad with the prize-winning pig at the county fair. And the first time he meet Belle (the lusty lady the devil sends to further his corruption), he’s so overcome by his hormones, he’s left dumbstruck: leaning over her, standing much too close, like the empty-headed jock mooning over the pretty new arrival at school. Craig’s Jabez Stone is a big galumphy kid at heart. Even after his fortunes multiply (at the expense of his friends and fellow townsfolk), he never seems to reach adulthood. When he throws a party to show off his new mansion, and hires a tailor to sew him something extravagant, it’s as if he’s playing dress up. He’s a kid in a candy store, sampling as much as he can, as fast as he can manage, and when things don’t go his way — e.g., when his invitees all choose to ghost his party (Belle improvises by welcoming real ghosts) — his tantrum is that of a child as well. As Craig plays Jabez, the loss and reclamation of his soul becomes a rite of passage — a necessary step towards manhood and maturity, and one we’re anxious to see him take.

Craig essays the role with bravado, but without ego; he understands the film will ultimately boil down to a battle between its two eponymous leads, and he’s secure enough to recede when the need arises. His Jabez Stone is beautifully characterized in ways that work both for the film and for Craig; he’s distinctive enough that you feel no other actor would have essayed the role quite like Craig, yet familiar enough that he remains a recognizable type. Craig manages to feel archetypical without growing ordinary. (Maybe he learned what not to do by studying Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle.) And in doing so, he helps justify the very premise of the piece, that what happens to him “could happen anytime — anywhere — to anybody”; when the devil — having failed in his attempt to acquire Stone’s soul — seizes on his next victim, his surprising choice makes perfect sense. Stone — for all the attributes that make him an uncommon character — isn’t all that different from the rest of us, is he? The Devil and Daniel Webster — equal parts dark fairy-tale and glistening fever dream — is a monumental film: proclaimed by critics, largely ignored by audiences, but reclaimed by history. And it boasts one of Craig’s best performances. The National Board of Review awarded the principal cast its Best Acting trophy for 1941, ignoring contenders from Citizen Kane, How Green Was My Valley and The Maltese Falcon, among others. Was there any doubt that James Craig had finally arrived?

As RKO readied future projects for Craig (including pairings with Signe Hasso and Jane Wyatt, plus a reteaming with Ginger Rogers in the tentatively titled Weekend for Three), they loaned him out to Walter Wanger for Friendly Enemies and to MGM for a pair of B Westerns. The first Metro film — Omaha Trail, about competing quests to build a railway line and to scuttle it — is the first time Craig seems more annoying than ingratiating onscreen. It’s like someone saw Kitty Foyle and thought, well, he's good at acting like a smart-ass; let’s stick him in the Wild West and see what happens. Except they offer no justification for his character or his actions. (By comparison, RKO had starred Craig in a B Western earlier that year — Valley of the Sun, opposite Lucille Ball — and although it’s not a film I’m fond of, its use of Craig is impeccable. It understands how to take a character defined by an eagerness to thumb his nose at convention and position him as a hero. When Craig defies the law, it’s to support the indigenous tribes who are being stripped of their possessions by crooked government agents. And when he interrupts Ball’s wedding by spraying the groom and attendees with red ants, it’s because he recognizes her intended as one of those agents, and knows he needs to look out for her reputation and her safety. He’s very much a rule-breaker and a rebel, but you’re given reasons throughout to cheer him on.) The Omaha Trail script (by Jesse Lasky Jr. and Hugo Butler) feels dashed off; you meet two dozen characters in the first five minutes, but never get to know any of them.

But despite the shakiness of his latest vehicle, while Craig was on the set for Omaha Trail, he was already being hailed as The Next Big Thing. He had caught the eye of MGM, after all; that was like a seal of approval. On June 23, 1942, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood” — a must-read column for millions of Americans, helping shape public perceptions of celebrities — gave him the full star treatment:

When I saw James Craig on the [Omaha Trail] set, I felt there was something in the wind over there, told him so, and was I right! He goes into Gambler's Choice, which was all set up for Clark Gable (and which will kill Craig’s trip to Houston, Tex., for the opening of his last picture). Funny thing about Jimmy — he's tall, virile, handsome, and guess how he learned to act! He played Rhett Butler for six months under direction of George Cukor, 'cause he made the tests with all the females who were tried out for Scarlett. So he should feel right at home in Clark Gable's shoes, 'cause he wore them first.

Hedda Hopper, too, was pushing the Gable connection, here in a story about Gone With the Wind that may or may not be true. (Given that Vivien Leigh was selected in December of 1938, and most of the actresses screen tested during the previous year, it seems highly unlikely that Craig — who spent most of 1938 in New York City or doing bit parts in Columbia programmers — mysteriously became George Cukor’s top choice for a Rhett stand-in. It feels more like the kind of hype that was handed to Hedda by someone in the MGM press department.) Hopper was right about one thing, though. Gambler’s Choice — a remake of MGM’s 1932 smash Manhattan Melodrama, starring Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy — was indeed his next project, reset in the Canadian wilderness and retitled Northwest Rangers. But it’s unimaginable that this project was “all set up for Clark Gable” — certainly not with up-and-comers William Lundigan and Patricia Dane co-starring and perpetual second-unit director Joseph M. Newman taking his first crack helming a picture. Newman proves so inept that almost none of the emotional beats come off, and they’re such simple ones: the woman who trades in a daredevil for his decent brother; the lawman who falls for his corrupt brother’s girl, but is too loyal and too guilty to bring him to justice. Newman keeps sitting on moments that beg to be glossed over, and when key scenes arrive, his attention seems elsewhere. Do we really believe this is a scenario Gable would have been placed into, or permitted? Hell, there’s no role for Craig to throw himself into. He’s not given that compulsion to see just how low he can go without sacrificing his soul, as Gable had in Manhattan Melodrama. He just seems to be having a swell time running a saloon and casino. Manhattan Melodrama is a memorable film about the price of having principles. The stakes are so high in the original, and so low in the remake, it’s almost unimaginable that they come from the same studio — let alone the same source.

Fortunately, Craig was soon back at RKO, the studio that understood him. Like Omaha Trail and Northwest Rangers, his next film — SEVEN MILES FROM ALCATRAZ — is a B movie, but unlike its MGM predecessors, it knows exactly what to do with Craig. He gets the star treatment — a screenplay based on his established screen persona, and the qualities that make him both individual and appealing — and he's sensational. Seven Miles From Alcatraz casts him as a prison escapee who takes shelter (and hostages) at a nearby lighthouse; the film is very much filtered through his eyes — and he runs with it. He’s a smartaleck and a scoundrel who faces a crisis of conscience: throw in with a group of Nazis who are willing to help him flee to South America, or swear his allegiance to the country that’s incarcerated him — and find a way to save the day. (The Nazis, hiding in submarines beneath San Francisco Bay, have plans far more nefarious than anything he’s imagined.) You can see Craig sharpening his skills; he finds little physicalities — the way he fiddles with his fingers, for example — that reveal how fast his mind is working. His character can be rash and cocky and uncouth, but Craig makes it clear — without reams of exposition — what’s contributed to that chip on his shoulder; he’s clearly a decent guy hardened by a lot of bad breaks. And as a result, it doesn’t seem a stretch when costar Bonita Granville (as one of his lighthouse hostages) falls for him — and ultimately decides to wait for him while he finishes out his prison sentence. Granville is unusually pallid (and Cliff Edwards, as another hostage, is overly animated), but Craig and fellow escapee Frank Jenks make a terrific team. Joseph Krumgold fills the screenplay with surprises, and director Edward Dmytryk — newly arrived at RKO — seems determined to impress, and succeeds. In retrospect, Seven Miles From Alcatraz probably offered Craig the most Gable-like role he ever essayed — the pre-Code Gable of 10 years earlier — but he’s grown armed with such a sure sense of self by 1942, you’d never mistake him for anyone else.

Enter Louis B. Mayer, who — according to the history books — had determined that Craig could be useful to MGM, and bought out his RKO contract. And miraculously, they had a great film waiting for him — certainly one of the best of his career. The backstory of THE HUMAN COMEDY is pretty well known to film aficionados: that William Saroyan wrote a four-hour screenplay that he intended to direct as well, then the studio — horrified by its length — relieved him of his scripting and directing duties. (Saroyan released the whole thing as a novel, which topped the best-seller list the week the movie was released.) Howard Estabrook took over the script, and Clarence Brown assumed directing duties — and it’s hard to imagine a better match for the material. In adapting Saroyan’s vignettes about a small California farming town during the early years of the war, Estabrook kept most of the key scenes — and a lot of a dialogue — but he also knew what to condense, reorder and reshape to forge a successful narrative. And he paid particular attention to one story-line. As the fellow who runs the local wire service and the socialite who won’t leave him alone, James Craig and Marsha Hunt (previously paired in Thunder Trail) get the only extended scenes written entirely by Estabrook. Their relationship is underserved by the book, but Estabrook augments their roles nicely. (Was that part of MGM‘s assignment: to build up these two newly-signed actors? )

Craig more than holds his own among a cast of veterans. “You’re wonderful, but you’re different,” he informs Hunt early on: “Your people are different, but especially you. You’re so spoiled, it’s wonderful.” It’s the kind of cockamamie logic that Craig had a talent for expressing. There’s no real development for Craig and Hunt’s characters in the book, so Estabrook forges it. He imagines a scene set at Hunt’s family manse that’s crucial to the film’s success. So much of the film has been unrelentingly sad (and the moments of happiness so fleeting), the romance that blossoms between Craig and Hunt during an evening with her parents and friends reminds us that life also offers us transformative moments that we don’t see coming. As Estabrook envisions it, Craig’s character looks down on Hunt’s friends and family because he presumes they’re going to look down on him — and then when they don’t, he’s determined to do them proud. The turnaround feels very much like Saroyan, as does the set-up, which essentially boils down to whether or not to wear a tie to dinner: a seemingly insignificant gesture that is made to speak volumes about generosity, grace and responsibility. And by the next day, Craig is left endlessly repeating a phrase from Saroyan’s book — in a truly memorably line reading — as he recalls Hunt asking and informing him, "You do love me, don't you? Yes, you do, you know you do." He conveys not only his infatuation, but what a perfect pair they’ve become, practically overnight; her love has made him just as dizzy as she is. Her giddiness was contagious, and now he’s spreading it. MGM finally gave Craig a role worthy of his talents, and he rewarded them with perhaps his single best screen performance. That performance — highly admired by critics of the day — should have netted him goodwill and good roles at Metro, and for reasons we’ll probably never understand, it didn’t.

Craig had the air of an upstart in his early films, and audiences embraced his subversive nature. Playing a rascal and a rogue — and making him lovable — came easily to Craig; MGM wanted no part of it. (Gable forged a career out of playing a rascal and a rogue; so much for stories about MGM using Craig as a fill-in.) His inflections are quickly deadened; the eyes soon stop flickering. His impish humor vanishes fast; given how indelibly he displays it in The Human Comedy, it's surprising how insistent the studio is that he replace it with an earnestness that’s disappointingly tame and conventional.

But it doesn’t happen right away. After The Human Comedy, he was given the male lead in the latest installment of Ann Sothern’s long-running Maisie series, SWING SHIFT MAISIE, and there’s momentary hope that MGM is figuring out who Craig is. Mary McCall was an erratic writer who — once the first Maisie movie proved a hit, and was subsequently reimagined as a film series — basically had a steady paycheck for nearly a decade, just turning out sequels. The best thing about her work on Swing Shift Maisie is that she seems to understand James Craig, and the source of his appeal. His fighter pilot is given the nickname Breezy, which might be the best description of the quality Craig brought to the screen. The screenplay is clearly intended to position him as a rising star; he’s the guy the two leading ladies fight over. The film starts wonderfully, with a scene of aeronautic derring-do, in which Craig gets a chance to show how he can command the screen. (It’s a role not unlike the one that had launched him to stardom in Kitty Foyle. You don’t always know what he’s thinking, or what he’ll do next; he seems like a free spirit who’s hiding a devout sense of responsibility.) And it keeps getting better as he inadvertently crashes showgirl Maisie’s new act, causing her to lose her job. It’s Sothern’s seventh Maisie film, but you’d never know it; she pours herself into it like it’s a make-or-break vehicle. Director Norman McLeod seems to have misplaced his comic timing, but the lines are good, and Sothern and Craig hit upon a comic rhythm that works for both their characters. He calls her “Goldilocks” and “Yellow Hair” and “Snub Nose”; McCall captures that irreverence that defined Craig, where even first names seem too formal or too dull. McCall understands, too, that he could be equally ingenuous, and accordingly, when Sothern’s housemate Jean Rogers appears thirty minutes in (a femme fatale inserted into a wartime comedy, faking a suicide in her prettiest peignoir), Breezy is just dumb enough to be taken in by such an obvious gold digger. Swing Shift Maisie isn’t the best of the Maisie series, but it’s far from the worst, and it does precisely what it needs to do to keep establishing Craig as an MGM star.

Breezy comes through Swift Shift Maisie with flying colors. But you feel a slight shift in the air in the film that follows it, LOST ANGEL. Craig’s creativity and energy flag in spots, and you can see his instincts being thwarted by MGM’s efforts to make him more suave and sophisticated. The lost angel in question is Margaret O’Brien, whom MGM was grooming for child stardom. Here she’s a six-year-old prodigy who — abandoned by her mother as a baby — has been raised by a team of scientists. They drill her on language, history and literature: all in an effort to see how developed a child’s mind can become if its earliest years aren’t “wasted.” The scientists, who've named her Alpha, think they’re exposing her to the world through facts and figures; Craig, as the reporter sent to do a story on her, introduces her to everything she’s missing. Lost Angel is an intriguing film in part because it operates on levels it's uncertain if screenwriter Isabel Lennart herself understood. It’s hard not to see it now as a satire of child stars of the era, whose images were manufactured by Hollywood — who lost all ability to live their lives, beholden as they were to a group of men who micromanaged their day-to-day activities. It’s what makes the movie much more than merely a sentimental drama. Craig and Marsha Hunt — as the girlfriend he keeps brushing off, due to his inability to commit — are expectedly well matched, but the surprise is how nicely Craig and O’Brien complement each other. He completely convinces as a newspaper man with a hard enough edge that he doesn’t mind fleecing his colleagues in weekly poker games, but a soft enough center that he instantly senses all that Alpha has been missing and tries to compensate. A good reporter, he not only has the skills to communicate with her, but to challenge her beliefs and ignite her imagination. As they go for a walk through New York City, and she gawks at commonplace images that seem enchanting to her, director Roy Rowland manages each effect perfectly: the organ grinder’s monkey manning its tin cup, the human billboard with the neon waistcoat advertising tobacco — culminating in their arrival in Times Square, with all its marquees emblazoned. She’s an eager pupil, and he’s a gentle instructor, anxious — beyond his own understanding — to expose her to a world of man-made magic. At one point when she expresses wonder at something he’s shown her, he beams with both rows of teeth, a symbol of paternal pride, and he’s rarely seemed like more of a movie star.

Lost Angel can't quite sustain its ingenuity. Things starts to fall apart about 30 minutes from the end, although the late-stage arrival of Keenan Wynn — a crook on the lam who becomes Alpha's latest babysitter — comes as a gift. The film starts to feel heavily edited, and Rowland’s setups — basically from close-up to long shot and back again — grow tiresome. And O’Brien, Craig and Hunt all fail to hit a few key emotional beats, although they redeem themselves by the fade-out. The film found a particular (and perhaps unexpected) champion in James Agee, the best film critic of his day:

Lost Angel has for a month been fluttering shyly around the sticks because MGM lacked confidence in its box-office aerodynamism. Reasons: the picture's lack of marquee names, the originality of its story. Lost Angel is a remarkably touching, tragicomic treatment of one of the world's sure-fire themes: the Misunderstood Child.

After a few rave paragraphs, he concluded:

Lost Angel has its drawbacks. It stacks its cards pretty heavily against its well-meaning scientists. And Newshawk James Craig's kind of love is as limited in its own way as the kind of science which Messrs. Philip Merivale, Donald Meek, et al. represent. Yet Lost Angel is an important and lovely picture. James Craig, Marsha Hunt, Keenan Wynn and, above all, seven-year-old Margaret O'Brien as Alpha, make it often very moving.

In retrospect, Agee didn't finger one item quite accurately. One of the reasons that "Craig’s kind of love”seems limited is because his performance doesn’t feel quite as full-throated as it might. His epiphanies seems muted; you can sense the studio watching over his shoulder, taming his responses. No more of that cockiness that RKO had cultivated; MGM wanted him refined. And indeed, within a year, Craig is firmly entrenched as an MGM romantic lead: the rough edges dulled down, the quirky mannerisms eliminated. (It’s a transformation only a touch less alarming than the one the Oliver Niles Studio initially forces on Esther Blodgett in A Star Is Born.) MGM even insists he grow a mustache: not to make him more like Gable, but to make him more debonair. (MGM prided itself on honing in on a star’s strengths and building it into a brand; who could possibly have looked at Craig’s run of films at RKO — in which he showed a talent for making ruffians, risk takers, hedonists and nonconformists all highly rootable — and imagined that “debonair” was the right direction to go?) Although the MGM makeover doesn't hobble the effectiveness of Lost Angel all that much, it will tarnish most of Craig's remaining roles at Metro.

The new, “improved” James Craig — a man who wouldn’t be out of place in a white dinner jacket — emerges in full force in 1944, and by that point, Craig’s golden age at MGM is pretty much over, barely a year after it began. The properties are mostly stinkers, and even when they’re not, the roles rarely allow him to shine. Third-billed in the excruciating The Heavenly Body, he’s demoted to a heartthrob (“a handsome hunk of man,” as the maid describes him). Second-billed in Marriage Is a Private Affair — a mess of a movie, with appeal only to masochists, voyeurs and Lana Turner enthusiasts — he’s reduced to the gentle voice of reason. She Went to the Races, a lackluster effort full of dumb misunderstandings, strands the top-billed Craig in a purely reactive role that feels all wrong for him. And most disappointing is Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Dalton Trumbo’s adaptation of George Victor Martin’s novel about a Norwegian family in the World War Il-era Wisconsin farmlands. (It’s a beloved film in some circles; I find much of it sickly sweet.) It’s inconceivable that Trumbo knew Craig was due to be cast as the local newspaper editor, because given all that Craig did for his underwritten character in Kitty Foyle, you’d think Trumbo would’ve scripted him a great part. But there’s no role there at all; Craig simply exists to extol the virtues of small-town living, and to provide a little romance. His performance is solid and charming, but also flat and undistinguished. Having been instructed to stifle his smart-aleck nature, he emerges as little more than a vehicle for exposition: a good-looking prop.

Craig fares better in KISMET, another of William Dieterle’s hallucinatory fairy-tales. As the Caliph who masquerades as a gardener to woo a beggar’s daughter, Craig is mostly asked to play straight man to three formidable personalities (Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich and Edward Arnold), but he brings his own brand of flippancy to the proceedings. (Dieterle knew him, and knew how to use him.) The pleasure he takes in ruffling Arnold’s feathers, his amusement in listening to the tales that Colman’s King of the Beggars weaves (knowing them to be pure blarney), and his oversized infatuation with his bride-to-be — it’s spot on. He and Harry Davenport are charged with dishing out a ton of exposition, and I don’t see how they could’ve done it better. And yet, with MGM micromanaging his new, refined image, you see Craig shying away from the more irreverent qualities — the gloating, the goading — that he would have played so well: qualities that would have served the story-line, but that weren’t in line with MGM’s plans for their latest leading man. DANGEROUS PARTNERS is also a mixed bag, a far worse film in which Craig might be just a touch better. It starts in the aftermath of a plane crash, where among the few survivors are a husband and wife — a pair of grifters, you sense; they manage to break into a man’s briefcase and discover that he’s carrying four wills for four different people, each leaving $1 million to him. It makes little sense to them, and even less to us, and one of the nice things about Marion Parsonnet’s screenplay is that we don’t really understand what it’s all about until shortly before the end, when the pieces fall neatly into place. Craig is woven into the screenplay about 15 minutes in, as a lawyer asked to redraft one of the wills; when his client is killed, he acquires a personal interest in the case. (“Large fees give me courage,” as he puts it.) Craig is well-cast (opposite Signe Hasso), but you don’t sense much inner life to his character; when the lines are bland — e.g., “let’s talk this over,” which he suggests to Hasso just after a murder has taken place — he’s not saying anything beyond what’s on the page, and what’s on the page is so bare, it needs a little subtext. Is he intrigued, horrified, amused? You have no idea; you see Craig questioning his instincts and muting his choices. (It’s about the only Craig role you can see being played by Clark Gable at the time, except Gable would’ve made use of his gift for being at once detached and engaged.) The film is dismally directed by Edward L. Cahn: static and stagy. But Hasso is laser focused — a schemer and a scrapper — and Craig is practically a poster boy for white male privilege. They‘re well paired. (And even Gable couldn’t have salvaged lines like “you look very fetching when you’re puzzled.”) It‘s a minor film, but not an unworthy one.

Nonetheless, watching Craig in 1944 and 1945 is like watching a man emerge occasionally from quicksand. You get brief glimpses of the figure you remember, and then he’s gone again. And yet some of his efforts to drag himself out of the muck are positively Herculean. GENTLE ANNIE is one of those.

On paper, Craig’s isn't a great role, but he makes it one. Set in Oklahoma Territory at the turn of the century, the film casts Craig as a US Marshal sent to Patoka City to identify and round up a trio of train robbers. He’s a government agent who disguises himself as a vagrant; upon discovering that shady sheriff and saloon keeper Barton McLean doesn’t take kindly to strangers, he takes refuge with a family on the outskirts of town: Marjorie Main and her two sons, Harry Morgan and Paul Langton. (They take in Donna Reed, too, after she quits her job at the saloon.) Feeling at ease with this new family, he sheds his disguise, and his transformation from faux hobo to screen hunk is impeccable. He’s costumed to show off his sturdy frame, with his shirt sleeves rolled up, revealing his biceps, and a shirt unbuttoned enough to expose the hairy chest below. (It’s in this minor movie that he gets the full star treatment.) Craig takes a character who could very well have been a cipher among a group of eccentrics (he’s given no backstory) and fleshes him out nicely. The way he takes to this adopted family, it's clear that he’s been a loner for too long. Perhaps his own childhood was a chilly one. The more his character settles in — the more he comes to care for Main and her sons — the more protective he grows, and that protectiveness reveals itself in some unexpectedly volatile and violent ways. Craig juggles his yearning for a home life with the ruthlessness required of a lawman, and leaves you to wonder which side will win out. Lawrence Hazard, adapting a story by future Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist MacKinlay Kantor, serves up some good reveals and misdirects, and given that the identity of the train robbers is never in question, that’s impressive. And when Craig kisses Donna Reed on the eyes and the nose before making his way to her mouth, the more romantic hearts in the audience can be forgiven for skipping a beat. Andrew Martin is best remembered as a second-unit director (he did the chariot race in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur). MGM employed him as a director sporadically from 1941 to 1954, and although I don’t know anything else in his repertoire — except King Solomon‘s Mines, which he took over mid-production — Gentle Annie reveals an infinitely more talented helmer than the history books would suggest.

By 1946, the return of so many of their leading men from battle — not just Gable, but James Stewart, Robert Taylor, Robert Montgomery, Gene Kelly and Van Heflin — prompted MGM to re-examine its approach to Craig. The question was no longer “how do we make him a star?“ (at which they had failed, through a willful inability to decipher his personality), but rather “what projects can we assign him that none of our bigger leading men would agree to?” They paired him — or perhaps “stranded him” would be more accurate — with child stars, because he could talk to them without talking down to them. (It was a gift that came naturally. In his heart, he was one of them: the adult who hadn’t fully learned to accept responsibility.) And so Craig — after being remodeled as a Colman clone — found himself reimagined as a generic father figure.

Having already worked with Butch Jenkins on The Human Comedy and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Craig was paired with him on two new projects: vehicles for Jenkins, not Craig. The first, Boys’ Ranch, is woven from the same cloth as Spencer Tracy’s Boys Town — here, a benched baseball player (Craig) opening a ranch for wayward youths. It’s an inoffensive film, although Skip Homeier, as the most troubled kid, gives such an unsubtle performance that he foreshadows his entire story-line. Craig is asked to do little more than be a strong-willed paternal presence; he’s charming, but you sense it’s the least taxing role he’s essayed since Reporter Ernest Gives Notes To. As directed by Roy Rowland with his customary brand of blandness, the film is so innocuous and predictable — a manufactured crowd-pleaser — it proved a nice-sized hit.

Whereas LITTLE MISTER JIM, the Jenkins-Craig follow-up, was a mega-flop — Jenkins’ biggest — and it’s pretty sensational. Craig is a junior officer in a military town who loses his wife to cancer, and unable to handle the loss, drowns his sorrows, leaving his houseboy (a sensational Ching Wah Lee) to care for his son. As directed by Fred Zinnemann, Little Mister Jim is a subversive piece of filmmaking that no doubt shocked and irritated audiences at the time. It insists that parents can be terrible at raising their children, and kids can be awful to each other. Families don’t necessarily pull together in times of crisis, and people don’t always recover from loss. Child rearing is hard, and a lot of times we get it wrong. And officious neighbors who “only want to help” are the most unendurable people on the face of the planet. Little Mister Jim doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Oh, there’s plenty of warmth, especially in the relationship between Jenkins and Lee, but ultimately, it’s a film that forces parents to look at the job they’re doing with their children, and how they might be failing them. Craig’s character is both too lenient and too strict — a disciplinarian who desperately wants his child to love him. It had been four years since Craig had been handed a part like this, and he tears into it like it was sirloin. In one devastating scene, after hearing about Jim throwing a tantrum in front of friends and neighbors, he summons him to the dinner table. Too drunk and too unfeeling to demand an explanation, and furious at himself for not having recovered faster from the loss of his wife, he decides to punish his son — turning on him so violently, you think he’s going to strike him. It’s incredibly disturbing. But sometimes, Little Mister Jim insists, our kids seem so rebellious, they bring out our worst instincts — and at other times, they’re so deeply intuitive (even to the point of disbelieving the lies we invent to comfort them), they make us feel powerless. At one point Craig’s character readily admits that part of him is terrified of his own child. And no doubt, a lot of parents stared at the precocious faces of their own children a few seats away in the theatre and realized they felt much the same way, and it made them deeply uncomfortable.

The studio had so little faith in Little Mister Jim that they let it sit on the shelf for a year after production wrapped, then cut it down to a barebones 61 minutes, rendering the story so incoherent and ineffectual that the film — upon its domestic release — predictably bombed. (Fortunately, it was screened in its entirety in Australia, and that’s the version that survives.) The film runs so contrary to MGM’s family-friendly messaging, it’s a wonder Louis B. Mayer let the film be made. And the role of the grieving father role was so far from the role Mayer had carved out for Craig — to woo pretty women and inspire troubled boys to be responsible young men — it’s amazing Mayer let him play it. Sadly, at the end of the day, it didn’t matter one bit to Mayer that Craig had given one of his finest performances. He needed a scapegoat for the film’s failure. Zinnemann was a visionary filmmaker who’d risen through the studio ranks; Jenkins was a dependable money-maker. If anyone was going to take the rap, it was Craig, and the timing couldn’t have been better. With even more of their male stars returning from the war, MGM had even less use for him. They tossed him into a woeful spinoff of their long-running Dr. Kildare series: one so likely to be off-putting to their loyal audience, you can only imagine they were hoping Craig would ask to be released from his contract. When that didn’t happen, they loaned him out to B-movie studio Eagle-Lion for a pair of pictures. Ironically — or perhaps tellingly — both proved a better fit for Craig than anything MGM had offered him in years.

THE MAN FROM TEXAS is the screen adaptation of Missouri Legend that I referenced earlier, its lead role changed from Jesse James to the fictional El Paso Kid. It’s the ideal role for Craig — in fact, it’s hard to imagine who in Hollywood would have done it better. You think at first that it’s going to be a pretty standard Western about an outlaw vowing to go straight — and indeed, for about the first 10 minutes, that’s all it is. Although Craig and Lynn Bari (as his wife) are very good, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. But around that 10-minute mark, Craig leaves Bari at the altar in order to avoid a sheriff’s posse (the two have only been married by a justice of the peace, and she craves a church wedding); later that night, he sits beside a campfire, a stream behind him glistening away, and his accomplice Johnny Johnston strums a guitar in accompaniment to a tune he’s just written: “She was left all alone today in church/ When the sheriff broke up their wedding/ On his bridal night no bride in sight/ Just himself and a horse for his bedding.” And you realize Craig and Bari’s aborted wedding has become a tune written by an outlaw who fancies himself a balladeer. (Popular nightclub singer Johnston is best remembered for introducing “The Old Black Magic” onscreen, and for starring in the musical adaptation of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on Broadway.) You start to understand what a group of delightful eccentrics you’ve found yourself among, and from that point on, the film develops a logic and a magic all its own. The Kid — blissfully naïve about how the world works — operates under his own set of rules, and everyone else scrambles to keep up. He announces, “I got a new way to get money from a bank. I’m gonna borrow it.” He thinks he can march into a bank and ask for a loan, and they won’t presume it’s a stickup. And of course, when he shows up at the bank, introduces himself as The El Paso Kid and tells them he wants to take out a loan, bank manager Harry Davenport is so certain he’s being robbed that he doesn’t hesitate to give The Kid the $500 he wants. And The Kid is utterly convinced that he’s being treated kindly because of his manners, good breeding and Christian values; later, he beams to his family (who have established new identities in a town far enough way that they won’t be recognized by the law) about the success of his plan: “It was nice to walk into a bank like any other man.”

The El Paso Kid’s ingenuousness is a perfect match for Craig — and so are his petulance and outrage. When he returns to the bank in a month to pay back his loan, he’s so insulted to learn that the bank manager presumed their previous transaction was of a criminal nature, he robs them in retaliation. No one’s going to accuse him of being an outlaw, not when he was being a gentleman. That’s the conflict that gives the film its kick — the tug-of-war between The Kid’s kindliness and his ruthlessness, which he can’t seem to reconcile — and it’s giddy, goofy fun. (At one point, he gifts some money to widow Una Merkel so she has enough to pay off the man who’s coming to collect on her house; she’s treated The Kid warmly, offering him a hot meal when he needed it, and it’s the least he can do. And then he proceeds to rob the man for treating Merkel so unfairly, in effect stealing back his own money.) Little Mister Jim gets knocked for being sappy, when there’s nothing sentimental about it. The Man From Texas gets blasted for being a lightweight drama when it’s a comedy — yet I’ve never seen one reviewer point that out. But then, it’s a character-driven comedy, not a plot-driven one, so maybe people simply aren’t used to Westerns being funny because of the characters’ outlooks and sensibilities, and not because the madcap adventures they find themselves in. By the end, when the local marshal deputizes Craig — the town’s leading citizen: a solid churchgoer and generous philanthropist — to help round up The El Paso Kid, the ironies start to pile up with almost gleeful abandon. The film is available only in a grainy print, but the glories of Craig, Bari, Johnston, Merkel and Davenport’s performances come through vividly, as does the wit of Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov’s screenplay.

It’s possible — as you watch Craig’s Eagle-Lion follow-up, NORTHWEST STAMPEDE — to suspect that the biggest detriment to his success is that he was born a decade too late. He would have been a natural for the screwballs of the ’30s; he was the perfect desirable yet dopey guy waiting to be upended, upstaged and uplifted by a savvy female. He could be sexy and stupefied at the same time — he was ready-made for all those roles that Melvyn Douglas and Don Ameche had to work at, cast opposite a strong woman like Claudette Colbert (Midnight) or Jean Arthur (Too Many Husbands).

In Northwest Stampede, Craig has his heart set on breaking a horse; Joan Leslie sets her sights on breaking him. If you see it through the lens of a screwball comedy, it makes a lot more sense than if you see it as a Western. The plot is a head-scratcher, as rodeo rider Craig returns home to the ranch he just inherited and decides not to tell the foreman (Leslie) who he is, but rather to take a job as one of the hands — before he sells the whole thing. (The humor stems not from the fact that Leslie is doing a man’s job and shouldn’t be — the chauvinistic viewpoint that cratered many a ’40s comedy — but from the fact that she’s doing a man’s job and Craig is too thick to see how good she is. In that respect, the spirit is pure screwball.) The big events — including her discovery of his true identity — all seem to happen off screen, forcing Craig and Leslie to do a lot of their acting in bug-eyed double takes. But the battle of wills works. Every time she digs in her heels, the more outraged and ornery he becomes, and with MGM determined to turn him into marble, it's a relief to see Craig 1.0 re-emerge. The success of the film has as much to do with second unit director B. Reeves Eason — who had staged, among other things, the climactic scene in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind — as it does with director Albert Rogell. Rogell gives the impression of someone who has never seen a movie, little alone directed one (insert shots never seem to match up, and crucial reaction shots are missing), but Eason fills the screen with vistas of the Canadian wilderness: green forests and clear blue lakes, and fields where wild horses seem to be eternally prancing. As for Craig, he gets to reengage with that thrill-seeking side that once defined him (rodeo pal Jack Oakie proves a solid sidekick). Somewhere in his performance you can spy both dismay at being loaned out to a Poverty Row studio and relief that he’s getting to do what he does best — and not being muzzled like a prized horse.

Paramount and Universal and RKO and even Eagle-Lion “got” James Craig; only his home studio MGM didn’t. Having failed to turn him into the refined leading man they envisioned — the one hopelessly at odds with his sly wit and ebullience — they consigned him to thankless supporting roles in the overpraised Side Street and the underwhelming Lady Without a Passport. But Side Street had some value: it suggested to MGM that Craig might work best for them as a heavy rather than a hero, and they handed him his first good villain role in THE STRIP, a noir-tinged celebration of Los Angeles’s famed Sunset Strip. Craig is reunited with Mickey Rooney as boss and employee (as they were in The Human Comedy), and once again they play wonderfully off each other. As a mob boss posing as a businessman, who offers Rooney’s out-of-work drummer a place in his organization, the 6’2” Craig towers over everyone. It makes him all the more intimidating, but paradoxically, all the more approachable: a ready-made father figure. (You understand why everyone keeps turning to him for help, even when they’re aware that any favors will come with strings.) The plot isn’t much, and the characterizations are pretty paper thin, but the musical performances are superb. You get to watch Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden in action, and to understand what both cheap and high-priced nightlife was like in the early ’50s. The song choices are mostly straightforward, but sometimes they serve the plot, handsomely. “Don’t Blame Me” (crooned by Vic Damone, with a dazzling coda) throbs with obsession; “A Kiss to Build a Dream On” (performed by everyone from Louis Armstrong to William Demarest) basks in self-delusion. And Rooney’s drumming (mostly simulating parts recorded by the great Cozy Cole) isn’t an expression of joy or triumph, but of insecurity, rage and grief. The film falls apart twenty minutes before the end, but it’s built up enough goodwill that it leaves you satisfied. And as far as Craig is concerned, you can practically feel him trying to prove something to MGM. If they’re going to saddle him with villain roles, he’ll attack them with as much relish as he did his earliest roles at Metro; in fact, he’ll infuse them with some of that cocky authority that audiences loved a decade earlier. His performance in The Strip is beyond reproach. MGM responded by loaning him out for three more films, then canceling his contract.

He gave a few commendable performances in films of the ’50s — but the fever was gone. The promise of Hollywood as a land of possibilities had been exposed as a lie, and he didn’t weather the bad news well. There was nothing left — as The Strip put it — to build a dream on. By the early ’50s it had become an industry joke that MGM was loaning him out as much as they were using him — and by that point, neither the roles nor his performances held much interest. His zeal had vanished. Perhaps coming so close to stardom, then finding it elusive, was too hard to swallow. Maybe the steady stream of subpar films started to feel like a sort of punishment. Or perhaps he had a penchant for self-destruction that the studio system helped unleash.

Drums in the Deep South, a Civil War drama with Craig as a reckless Confederate Major, should’ve been a slam dunk; Craig nails the necessary desperation, but there doesn’t seem to be much underlying authority. (Playing his paramour, Barbara Paxton has a cool, distant beauty that isn’t what’s called for at all; you want a fragile firebrand whose emotions take over, allowing her to realize her potential.) Fort Vengeance — one of his best-known Westerns — is like an inverted Northwest Rangers, with Craig now the more level-headed of two brothers forging a new life with Canada’s Mounted Police; it’s as tired and dreary as its predecessor. In Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps, an overrated bit of lethargy which functions neither as effective crime drama nor as newspaper exposé, he’s upstaged by at least seven of his costars. And they’re giving mostly awful performances, but at least they have some punch — whereas Craig too often recedes into the woodwork. There’s little he can do to enliven unfortunate films like Massacre, Naked in the Sun and Ghost Diver. And don’t get me started on the 1957 shlock horror film The Cyclops. (It should be a low-budget low point, but you can’t even imagine the horrors ahead.) Sometimes reconnecting with an old costar lights a spark, as in 1956’s THE WOMEN OF PITCAIRN ISLAND, which reunites him with his Man from Texas wife Lynn Bari. Other times you see him flexing old but still appealing muscles (e.g., SHOOT-OUT AT MEDICINE BEND, in which he reinvents his mob boss from The Strip as the evil entrepreneur of a western town, a fine foil for hero Randolph Scott). And occasionally you see him using his disillusion as an acting tool, channeling it into his character’s, as in LAST OF THE DESPERADOS and FOUR FAST GUNS.

Last of the Desperados (1955) is a poignant film for a number of reasons. It’s the first evidence of an issue that will plague Craig during his final 15 years onscreen: he ages so fast, he makes Errol Flynn look like Dorian Gray. (Hollywood had taken its toll, but so had alcoholism.) But there’s something unsettling in the storyline as well. Craig is an overworked sheriff who decides to take out his nemesis Billy the Kid before he can terrorize the region any further. But in retaliation, Billy’s gang decides to target not only him, but all the citizens he's sworn to protect. At one point, he instructs the townsfolk to form a posse (à la High Noon), promising that together they can bring the outlaws in — and no one follows. He realizes that the people he held in such high esteem are basically cowards — and what’s more, they don’t see it as their fight; they see it as his. They don’t understand the sacrifices he’s made, and they’re not willing to bear his burden. And if you’ve seen enough James Craig movies, it’s easy to wonder if — as he was filming it — he didn’t see that moment as a metaphor for his relationship with MGM, who promised to have his back, but never truly did.

A third of the way through Last of the Desperados, Craig’s sheriff is forced to abandon his post and set up shop in a town where his identity remains unknown. He shaves off his mustache, takes a humble job tending bar, releases the weight of the world from his shoulders — and in time turns back into the James Craig you remember from those early '40s programmers. And that buoyant transformation reappears even more forcefully in 1958’s MAN OR GUN. It’s a taut and novel B Western from Republic Pictures about a drifter (Macdonald Carey) who comes to town with a gun that’s said to be charmed. But does the gunman win every shoot-out because his pistol gives him supernatural speed, or does his opponents’ paranoia prompt them to hesitate before pulling the trigger? Craig is cast in a supporting role, but third billed. (In the ’50s and beyond, he frequently received better billing than his parts warranted; either he maintained a healthy respect within the industry, or he had a terrific agent.) In a film where everyone’s furiously plotting or scheming, his character is the only one who’s infused with joy. He’s got a hearty laugh: that zest for life that you haven’t seen in a long time. When his wife offers him a charm to keep away the sharpshooter who’s bent on killing his family, he cheekily reassures her, “Look, I’ve got a charm in my boot for rattlesnakes. I’ve got one around my neck. I got one around my arm. I don’t need those things. You’re my charm.” Countering all the town gossip about a mystical gun, Craig declares that it’s love that provides real security — and as he basks in its protective powers, his bravado proves inspirational, and his hunger for his wife altogether enviable. And when he flashes that familiar smile, in which his right upper lip seems to rise on its own (signaling he’s the keeper of a secret you can only hope to decipher), you might well flashback to the ’40s and recall why exhibitors in 1943 — the year he signed with MGM — named him the industry’s Most Promising Newcomer.

Craig kept making films until the early ’70s, mixing in regular TV guest shots. I’ve skipped the ’60s films and the TV roles; I’m more concerned with the evolution into a star that never quite materialized, and by 1950 it’s already quite clear that fame is not in his future. But the way he’s been remembered is shockingly inaccurate. In his RKO days, in his first films at Metro, and in his two loan-outs to Eagle-Lion, he’s a singular and impressive presence: an impish and oddball leading man, whose cockeyed view of the world keeps him from fully growing up. And that Peter Pan quality makes him irresistible. That wasn’t how MGM wanted him seen, and by giving him roles in which he didn’t shine, by taking a hatchet to some of his best films, and by loaning him out as often as they used him, Metro pretty much killed his career and his legacy. If he’s largely remembered as “wooden,” “forgettable” or “the worst actor to ever work in Hollywood,” it’s likely that the viewer isn’t focusing on the right films. (As for the person claiming he did “dozens of western roles but never seems to stand out in any of them,” let’s be charitable and presume they never saw Gentle Annie or The Man From Texas or the hard-to-find Man or Gun.) Craig once spoke of his initial impressions of Hollywood: “I was out there [on vacation] and I saw a lot of people making movies. If they could do it, why couldn't I?” And he was right; he could do it. But sadly, he’s come to be remembered for some of his worst work. Given MGM’s reputation as a star-making studio, it’s reasonable to presume that his talents thrived in the twenty or so films he made there. But if you want to see what made Craig special — and the qualities that should have made him a star — you need to check out the bigger picture.

Want more Classic Hollywood? If so, I take an expansive look at the career of one of my favorite Classic Hollywood directors, the sadly forgotten William Dieterle, here. I take a look here at all the films Errol Flynn did for Warner Bros. between 1935 to 1950: from his first starring role in Captain Blood to the termination of his contract after Rocky Mountain. I delve into one of Hollywood’s most extraordinary actresses, Margaret Sullavan, and her 16 films here. I serve up The 10 Best Screwball Comedies, and The 25 Best Film Noirs, and some of the titles are sure to surprise you. My other essays are all about TV, past and present, but if you take to TV as much as film, there's an index of the more than 100 TV essays I've written; you might see something you like, be it a drama series or a sitcom or one of my “best of” lists.