I’ve probably mentioned somewhere along the line that I prefer old movies to current ones. Some of my favorite movies were produced before I was born. Some were produced when my now deceased parents were young and well before they were married.
I like those movies because unlike current movies they depended on the talent of the cast to produce an interesting story. Most of those films were shot in black and white because color film was much more expensive back then.
John Ford was a master director more because he was great at framing shots than he was great at directing the actors. In fact most of the actors who worked with him didn’t like him at all and vice versa. There were a few exceptions, Ward Bond being one. I’ll talk more about Bond in another post.
Ford had an unofficial cast of stock actors who were in many of his films. They’d often play similar characters and thus were actual character actors. Ward Bond was the most frequent member of the this group, but there were others.
The other day I was watching (once again) Fort Apache from 1948. The stars of the film were John Wayne and Henry Fonda. There were many of Ford’s regulars in the cast including Bond, Hank Worden, Victor McLaglen, and Jack Pennick.
Pennick was born in 1895 and had a varied career. A US Marine in World War 1 Pennick worked later on as a horse wrangler. Which is where he met Ford and started working for him as both an actor and a military technical advisor.
During World War 2, Pennick was in the US Navy and became in a photographer in Ford’s photographic unit as part of the Office of Strategic Services. He also was a drill instructor for many of the OSS recruits that came directly from civilian life.
After the war he appeared in a number of Ford’s films including Fort Apache. In 1960 he worked as a technical advisor on another John Wayne/John Ford film “The Alamo.”
Over the years Pennick appeared in over 140 films from 1926 until 1962. His last role was as an uncredited character in the film “How The West Was Won.” Fittingly that segment was directed by Ford and starred John Wayne.
Just another character actor who added a lot of character to the films he was in. The little known performers who made big contributions to cinema.
I enjoyed reading about your appreciation for old films. I am a frequent watcher at TCM for similar reasons.
Jack Pennick was our neighbor in Manhattan Beach after my folks moved there from MA. My dad idolized the man, counting on him for advice on the update to our home, his wife Bessie (we called her Betty) and my mom became good friends. Jack became my Godfather when I was born in 1957. He, not my working dad, taught me how to ride a bike, drove my sister to Los Angeles for treatments when she had pneumonia, rolled his own cigarettes, had a black terrier, Spunky and I became good friends with a granddaughter, Sally. We were visiting family in MA when he passed. We flew home immediately, such was his worth to our family.
Thank you for sharing that. We very rarely know more about actors than what is seen in their public lives.
I grew up in Massachusetts and spent much of my life there before we moved to Texas.