Top Ten Western Movie Sidekicks
Over the last several years, I have started watching a lot of westerns on television and Netflix. Here is my list of top 10 sidekicks from the movies and TV.
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- Actor
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American character actor, the most famous of Western-movie sidekicks of the 1930s and 1940s. He was born May 7, 1885, the third of seven children, in the Hayes Hotel (owned by his father) in the tiny hamlet of Stannards, New York, on the outskirts of Wellsville, New York. Hayes was the son of hotelier and oil-production manager Clark Hayes, and grew up in Stannards. As a young man, George Hayes worked in a circus and played semi-pro baseball while a teenager. He ran away from home at 17, in 1902, and joined a touring stock company. He married Olive Ireland in 1914 and the pair became quite successful on the vaudeville circuit. Retired in his 40s, he lost much of his money in the 1929 stock market crash and was forced to return to work. Although he had made his film debut in a single appearance prior to the crash, it was not until his wife convinced him to move to California and he met producer Trem Carr that he began working steadily in the medium. He played scores of roles in Westerns and non-Westerns alike, finally in the mid-1930s settling in to an almost exclusively Western career. He gained fame as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick Windy Halliday in many films between 1936-39. Leaving the Cassidy films in a salary dispute, he was legally precluded from using the "Windy" nickname, and so took on the sobriquet "Gabby", and was so billed from about 1940. One of the few sidekicks to land on the annual list of Top Ten Western Boxoffice Stars, he did so repeatedly. In his early films, he alternated between whiskered comic-relief sidekicks and clean-shaven bad guys, but by the later 1930s, he worked almost exclusively as a Western sidekick to stars such as John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Randolph Scott. After his last film, in 1950, he starred as the host of a network television show devoted to stories of the Old West for children, The Gabby Hayes Show (1950). Offstage an elegant and well-appointed connoisseur and man-about-town, Hayes devoted the final years of his life to his investments. He died of cardiovascular disease in Burbank, California, on February 9, 1969.- Jay Silverheels was born on Canada's Six Nation's Reserve and was one of 10 children. He was a star lacrosse player and a boxer before he entered films as a stuntman in 1938. He worked in a number of films through the 1940s before gaining notice as the Osceola brother in a Humphrey Bogart film Key Largo (1948). Most of Silverheels' roles consisted of bit parts as an Indian character. In 1949, he worked in the movie The Cowboy and the Indians (1949) with another "B movie" actor Clayton Moore. Later that year, Silverheels was hired to play the faithful Indian companion, Tonto, in the TV series The Lone Ranger (1949) series, which brought him the fame that his motion picture career never did.
Silverheels recreated the role of Tonto in two big-screen color movies with Moore,The Lone Ranger (1956) and The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958). After the TV series ended in 1957, Silverheels could not escape the typecasting of Tonto. He would continue to appear in an occasional film and television show but became a spokesperson to improve the portrayal of Indians in the media. - Actor
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Leo Carrillo was born on 6 August 1881 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was an actor, known for The Guilty Generation (1931), The Cisco Kid (1950) and Crime, Inc. (1945). He was married to Edith Shakespear Haeselbarth. He died on 10 September 1961 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Actor
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Smiley worked on a local radio station and in Vaudeville after high school. Always interested in music, he was friends with Gene Autry and worked with him on the radio show "The National Barn Dance". When Westerns became a big draw with sound, the studios were always on the lookout for singing cowboys. In 1934, both Gene and Smiley made their debuts in In Old Santa Fe (1934). Smiley became well known as Gene's plump sidekick Frog Milhouse, and they worked together in over 80 Westerns. After Gene, Smiley provided the comic relief for other cowboy stars at Republic such as Sunset Carson and Charles Starrett (The Durango Kid). He also provided a lot of the music as he wrote over 300 western songs and sang quite a few in the films. Smiley was the first supporting actor to regularly appear on the Top Ten Western money-maker list. He became well known for his white horse with the black circle around one eye. When he used a team of white horses, as when he was 'Spec Specialist' Smiley Burnette, each white horse had one black circle around one eye. When the 'B' movie Western reign ended in 1953, Smiley retired from the screen. He made occasional appearances on television including being a regular on the music show "Ozark Jubilee (1959)". His last performance was as railroad engineer Charlie Pratt on Petticoat Junction (1963) from 1963-67.- Actor
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Al St. John was born on 10 September 1893 in Santa Ana, California, USA. He was an actor and director, known for Billy the Kid in Texas (1940), Prairie Badmen (1946) and Billy the Kid Trapped (1942). He was married to Yvonne June Villon Price Pearce (actress), Lillian Marion Ball and Flo-Bell Moore. He died on 21 January 1963 in Lyons, Georgia, USA.- Eddy Waller worked in vaudeville and the theater before he entered movies in 1936. Within a few years he was being cast in character parts. In the 1940s he would be a mainstay in the westerns of Republic Pictures and would work with just about every cowboy actor from Tim Holt to Rocky Lane. With Lane, Eddy's billing would be as high as second, as he played grizzly old prospector Nugget Clark, adding the comic relief to a picture with such pearls as "He is as square as the day is long". The "B" western finally died out in the 1950s, and so did Eddy's career.
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American character actor primarily of Western "sidekick" roles. Born John Forest Knight in Fairmont, West Virginia, Knight joined a traveling minstrel show as a musician at age 15. He attended The University of West Virginia as a law student, supporting himself as the drummer in his own band. Finding music more rewarding, he left school and played on the vaudeville and cabaret circuits. He appeared in Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1927 and on Broadway as a musical performer in "Here's Howe" and "Ned Wayburn's Gambols." He also played drums for the Irving Aaronson and George Olsen big bands. He appeared in a few short films for MGM and Paramount from 1928 to 1931, performing his "Little Piano" act. Mae West saw Knight in vaudeville and championed him for her film She Done Him Wrong (1933) and gave him his first substantive film role. His comic style and the soft voice which had given him his nickname stood him in good stead in movies, and he appeared in nearly 200 films over the next thirty years. His singing was a memorable part of the films The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) and The Shepherd of the Hills (1941), but it was as a Western sidekick that he gained his greatest fame. He played the comic pal of Johnny Mack Brown and other cowboy heroes in scores of Westerns, and was listed among the Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars in 1940. In the 1950s, he gained new audiences with his sidekick role on Buster Crabbe's TV series Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion (1955). He retired in 1960, but continued to make occasional appearances. He died in his sleep at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California at 74, survived by his wife, actress Patricia Ryan (née Thelma de Long). He is buried in an unmarked grave next to the grave of comedian Maxie Rosenbloom at Valhalla Memorial Park in Burbank, California.- Actor
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The son of a circuit-riding Methodist preacher in rural Alabama, Pat Buttram became one of America's best-known comic entertainers. He left Alabama a month before his 18th birthday to attend the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. An announcer from radio station WLS was on hand to interview members of the crowd and settled on Pat as a typical visitor from the South. The interview that followed was anything but typical. Pat made a hit with his hilarious observations on the fair and was immediately offered a job with the station. This led to a long and happy association with the popular "National Barn Dance" radio program. During those years Pat met Gene Autry, who took a liking to the young comic and later brought him to Hollywood to replace Smiley Burnette, who had found other work while Gene served in WWII. Together Pat and Gene made many western films and a television series, The Gene Autry Show (1950), which aired from 1950 until 1956. They remained close friends until Pat's death in 1994.
In 1952 Pat married actress Sheila Ryan, whom he had met on the set of Mule Train (1950). Over the next 40 years Pat prospered in radio, films and television, making stand-up appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948) (aka "The Ed Sullivan Show") and lending his vocal talents to many animated television shows and films, including several Walt Disney features. In the early 1960s he revealed a flair for dramatic acting when Alfred Hitchcock tapped him for roles in two The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962) episodes. His big television break came in 1965 with the role of "Mr. Haney" in the long-running CBS comedy Green Acres (1965). Throughout his career Pat was in constant demand as a toastmaster and after-dinner speaker, where his agile and sophisticated wit belied his "countrified" appearance. In 1982 Pat founded the Golden Boot Awards to honor actors, directors, stunt people and other industry professionals who have made significant contributions to the western film genre. Proceeds from the annual event are donated to the Motion Picture Health and Welfare Fund.- Actor
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Pat Brady was born on 31 December 1914 in Toledo, Ohio, USA. He was an actor, known for Man from Music Mountain (1943), Sons of the Pioneers (1942) and The Roy Rogers Show (1951). He was married to Fayetta and Carol. He died on 27 February 1972 in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, USA.- Actor
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Rotund comic character actor of American films. Born Andrew Vabre Devine in Flagstaff, Arizona, he was raised in nearby Kingman, Arizona, the son of an Irish-American hotel operator Thomas Devine and his wife Amy. Devine was an able athlete as a student and actually played semi-pro football under a phony name (Jeremiah Schwartz, often erroneously presumed to be his real name). Devine used the false name in order to remain eligible for college football. A successful football player at St. Mary & St. Benedict College, Arizona State Teacher's College, and Santa Clara University, Devine went to Hollywood with dreams of becoming an actor. After a number of small roles in silent films, he was given a good part in the talkie The Spirit of Notre Dame (1931) in part due to his fine record as a football player. His sound-film career seemed at risk due to his severely raspy voice, the result of a childhood injury. His voice, however, soon became his trademark, and he spent the next forty-five years becoming an increasingly popular and beloved comic figure in a wide variety of films. In the 1950s, his fame grew enormously with his co-starring role as Jingles P. Jones opposite Guy Madison's Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951), on television and radio simultaneously. In 1955, before the Hickok series ended, Devine took over the hosting job on a children's show retitled Andy's Gang (1955), in which he gained new fans among the very young. He continued active in films until his death in 1977. He was survived by his wife and two sons.