For Conservative Movie Lovers: King Vidor, Wallace Beery and ‘The Champ’ Part 2

The Champ marks the third time in a row — after John Wayne and Burt Reynolds — that I’ve chosen a movie starring an actor many deride as a “natural,” a “ham,” someone who gained stardom not by skill but mere charisma. The sort of rough-hewn appeal epitomized by Wallace Beery (1885–1949) isn’t something that can be taught by Stanislavski or faked with The Method. It comes from within, and evokes American qualities and ideals that have never gone out of style.

Beery was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest son of three. He dropped out of school in fourth grade (“I was too dumb to get any farther”) and ran away for a few months, bumming around the Midwest, spurred onward not by a hatred of family but by a sense of pure adventure. At sixteen he lied his way into a job as an elephant handler with a circus, spending the next three years traveling across the country, and even crediting himself with being the first to train elephants to use their trunks to grab the tails of the elephants in front of them in order to keep them all in line. But eventually he realized that, where bull handling was concerned, “my ambition had been no ambition at all, that I was just drifting.” When Beery heard that his older brother Noah was working on Broadway in New York, he hurried there to try his hand at the acting game. (more…)