Frank Faylen’s working stiff roles playing cops, cabbies, and bartenders, though lasting mere minutes over several hundred feet of film, were indelibly etched on the American psyche.
Who can forget his portrayal of the warm-hearted cab driver, Ernie Bishop, in It’s a Wonderful Life?
“Family man,” he quips in his first scene, when Bert, the cop, played by Ward Bond, eschewing the pub, makes a beeline for home at day’s end.
Born 105 years ago this week in St. Louis, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, his devoutly Catholic parents, the vaudevillian team of Ruf & Cusik, christened him “Charles Frances Ruf.”
Then came his showbiz baptism by fire. His mother Mary Madeleine was the acrobatic and singing star of “Rice’s Extravaganza” during TR’s larger-than-life presidency — marrying the featured comic, O.C. Ruf, in 1900. After the show closed in 1903, they toured together and lived on a showboat. Little Frank debuted at 18 months, when, instead of saying “bottle” as he raised his milk, he “slammed” it “into the footlights, causing a short circuit, darkening the stage and, at the right moment electrifying the house with a piercing treble,” wrote the New York Times.
After attending St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in the charming St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, Frank returned to vaudeville, finally convincing his parents to end their seven-year retirement and tour with him, starting in 1926, in a three-act singing and acrobatic show he wrote. Quite the feat considering his father now counseled against the stage, advice his four younger brothers took. Behind the smiles were tears. Mary retired in 1929, the Stock Market crashed, and O.C. died in 1930, thirty years shy of his wife.
Frank carried on with his beautiful and talented bride, Carol Hughes, whom he wed in 1928, initially touring the Midwest as the comedy dancing and singing vaudeville act, “Faylen and Hughes.”
It was perhaps inevitable that the couple would catch the eye of talent scouts, who, in 1935, during an LA swing, screen-tested and signed them. Frank never looked back. Averaging 12 pictures a year, through 1950, half of his roles were uncredited.
While he played mostly loveable characters, he finally got his big break in The Lost Weekend (1945), playing, against type, the cold-hearted nurse Bim in an alcohol detox ward at Bellevue Hospital, tormenting Don Birnam (Ray Milland).
That teed up his iconic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) film role. Like Fred Derry in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Ernie had played an outsized role in the war as part of the storied Army Air Force parachuting into Normandy, only to return to humble cabdriver duty.
But, while small, this role, like so many others he played, left a warm place in theatre-goers’ hearts, as one of George Bailey’s childhood friends, now nursing wounds of war, being helped by Bailey Bros Building and Loan. An oh-so-American role that this brown-eyed, rusty-haired Hollywood star, with a shy, warm Irish smile, his Catholic heart shining through, played to perfection. And, though never nominated for an Academy Award, he appeared in 10 Best Picture-nominated films including Gone with the Wind (1939), Sergeant York (1941) and Pride of the Yankees (1942).
With the invasion of the small screens, Faylen pivoted, in 1951, to guest on more than a dozen TV shows including The Ann Sothern Show and famously played Dobie’s father, Herbert T. Gillis, on the TV hit, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-1963). In it, he portrayed a no-nonsense, by-the-book World War II vet and child of the Great Depression, now grocery-store owner, helpless to understand his “beat generation” kid — and happiest seeing him push a broom at his store.
His final role, fittingly enough, was that of “Keeney” in Funny Girl (1968), owner and producer of small-time vaudeville theatre, Keeney’s Music Hall, who gives Fanny Brice (Barbara Streisand) her first comedic break.
With that, he essentially called it quits and stayed close to the love of his life he was married to for 57 years, with whom he had two children, Carol and Catherine, also actresses.
Much beloved, he was awarded a lifetime membership in the Los Angeles taxi driver union given how many times he played to perfection the average Joe behind the taxicab wheel. An honor he would not trade for an Oscar. He died on August 2, 1985, of pneumonia and is buried at San Fernando Mission Catholic Cemetery in Mission Hills alongside his bride. That she breathed her last less than a week after the 10th anniversary of Frank’s death, seems clear testament to the strength of their bond, and their deep Catholic faith.
