Arthur Hunnicutt

John Wayne was three years older than Arthur Hunnicutt. I only know that because I looked it up. In El Dorado, my favourite of Hunnicutt’s movies, he appears to be considerably older—older than Robert Mitchum, who was ten years younger than Wayne and seven years younger than Hunnicutt. Really, the ages in that movie are jarring in a lot of ways; Ed Asner plays the villain, at age 37, and it’s as hard to wrap your brain around that as it is around a 26-year-old James Caan. But Hunnicutt seems to have been of another generation, someone who was older during the war than Wayne and Mitchum. He was older than Mitchum, true, but not as much as I’d thought.

Hunnicutt was born in the unincorporated area of Gravelly, Arkansas. His original plan had been to go into teaching. However, he ran out of money and had to drop out. He started working in stock theatre and traveling companies, becoming well known in several states. After a while, he had enough to spend a year in acting school, which he followed with more touring. He also worked in the Algonquin Hotel; while Dorothy Parker and her associates were being witty upstairs, Hunnicutt spent seventeen months in the laundry downstairs, auditioning for Broadway roles at the same time.

It’s not actually surprising that I thought he was older than he was; many of his characters were older than he was. It’s mathematically viable for his performance of Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road, his first major role—in the touring company, of course—but only just. Many of his characters were of the Grizzled Old Man variety. He played country men, rural men. Apparently he based many characters’ mannerisms on the ones he used in Tobacco Road.

He had a series of B-pictures playing a character simply called “Arkansas” almost immediately upon arriving in Hollywood. He did one other movie, about oil wells, and then launched straight into a series of movies starring one Charlie Starrett. Starrett mostly played guys named Steve, and even when he was playing his long-running “Durango Kid” series, he had all sorts of “real” names, many of which were Steve Something-or-other. Hunnicutt was third-billed as Arkansas, for eight movies of the enormous numbers that Starrett did.

All in all, though, Hunnicutt would act opposite the most amazing list of people. Oh, he also acted under some of the great directors. John Ford and Otto Preminger, to name two. But even when you look up the one episode of some obscure TV show he was on in 1963, it turns out Elsa Lanchester was on the same episode. He’s not the most familiar person in the world, even given his Best Supporting Actor nomination—he was up against Richard Burton and Jack Palance and lost to Anthony Quinn. But goodness he got around.