Snub Pollard
Harold Fraser, known professionally as Snub Pollard, was an Australian-born vaudevillian, who became a silent film comedian in Hollywood, popular in the 1920s.
Career
Born in Melbourne, Australia, on 9 November 1889, Pollard began performing with Pollard's Lilliputian Opera Company at a young age. Like many of the actors in the popular juvenile company, he adopted Pollard as his stage name. The company ran several highly successful professional children's troupes that traveled Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 1908, Harry Pollard joined the company tour to North America. After the completion of the tour, he returned to the US. By 1915 he was regularly appearing in un-credited roles in movies, for example Charles Epting notes that Pollard can clearly be seen in Chaplin's 1915 short By the Sea. In later years, Pollard claimed Hal Roach had discovered him while he was performing on stage in Los Angeles.Pollard played supporting roles in the early films of Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels. The long-faced Pollard sported a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache turned upside-down; this became his trademark. Lloyd's producer, Hal Roach, gave Pollard his own starring series of one- and two-reel shorts. The most famous is 1923's It's a Gift, in which he plays an inventor of many Rube Goldberg-like contraptions, including a car that runs by magnet power.
In early 1923, shortly after his second marriage, Pollard returned with his wife Elizabeth to see his relations in Australia. His visit attracted considerable attention, and he appeared again in several theatres to speak about the motion picture business. On his return to the US, he left Roach and joined the low-budget Weiss Brothers studio in 1926. There he co-starred with Marvin Loback as a poor man's version of Laurel and Hardy, copying that team's plots and gags.
In later years, Pollard claimed the great depression wiped out his investments, and he had been unable to "adjust to the talkies." However, in the 1930s, he played small parts in talking comedies, and was featured as comic relief in "B" westerns. Pollard's silent-comedy credentials guaranteed him work in slapstick revivals. He appeared with other film veterans in Hollywood Cavalcade, The Perils of Pauline, and Man of a Thousand Faces. He also appeared regularly as a supporting player in Columbia Pictures' two-reel comedies of the mid-1940s.
Forsaking his familiar mustache in his later years, he landed much steadier work in films as a mostly uncredited bit player. He played incidental roles in scores of Hollywood features and shorts, almost always as a mousy, nondescript fellow, usually with no dialogue: In Wheeler & Woolsey's Cockeyed Cavaliers he played a drunken doctor and at the end of Miracle on 34th Street, when a squad of bailiffs hauling sacks of mail enters the courtroom, Pollard brings up the rear. In Singin' in the Rain he receives the umbrella of Gene Kelly after his famous "Singin' in the Rain" scene. In Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles, Pollard plays a Broadway beggar. His last film, Twist Around the Clock, shows him wordlessly reacting to a curvaceous woman dancing energetically.
Death and recognition
Snub Pollard died of cancer on 19 January 1962, aged 72, after nearly 50 years in the movie business. His interment was at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.For his contributions to motion pictures, Pollard has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6415½ Hollywood Boulevard.
Selected filmography
- as Butler
- A Coat Tale
- By the Sea as Ice Cream Clerk
- His Regeneration as Extra
- Giving Them Fits as Luke's Co-Worker
- Bughouse Bellhops as Moke Morpheus
- Tinkering with Trouble as Sourball Joe
- Great While It Lasted as Hugo Snubb
- Ragtime Snap Shots as Snub Larkin
- A Foozle at the Tee Party
- Ruses, Rhymes and Roughnecks
- Peculiar Patients' Pranks
- Lonesome Luke, Social Gangster as Tin-Horn Tommy
- Police as First Flophouse Customer
- Lonesome Luke Leans to the Literary
- Luke Lugs Luggage
- Lonesome Luke Lolls in Luxury
- Luke, the Candy Cut-Up
- Luke Foils the Villain
- Luke and the Rural Roughnecks
- Luke Pipes the Pippins
- Lonesome Luke, Circus King
- Luke's Double
- Them Was the Happy Days!
- Luke and the Bomb Throwers
- Luke's Late Lunchers
- Luke Laughs Last
- Luke's Fatal Flivver
- Luke's Society Mixup
- Luke's Washful Waiting
- Luke Rides Roughshod
- Luke's Lost Lamb
- Luke, Crystal Gazer
- Luke Does the Midway
- Luke Joins the Navy
- Luke and the Mermaids
- Luke's Speedy Club Life
- Luke and the Bang-Tails
- Luke, the Chauffeur
- Luke's Preparedness Preparations
- Luke, the Gladiator
- Luke, Patient Provider
- Luke's Newsie Knockout
- Luke's Movie Muddle as Projectionist
- Luke, Rank Impersonator
- Luke's Fireworks Fizzle
- Luke Locates the Loot
- Luke's Shattered Sleep
- Lonesome Luke's Lovely Rifle
- Luke's Lost Liberty
- Luke's Busy Day
- Luke's Trolley Troubles
- Lonesome Luke, Lawyer
- Luke Wins Ye Ladye Faire
- Lonesome Luke's Lively Life
- Lonesome Luke on Tin Can Alley as Cafe Waiter
- Lonesome Luke's Honeymoon
- Lonesome Luke, Plumber
- Stop! Luke! Listen!
- Lonesome Luke, Messenger
- Lonesome Luke, Mechanic
- Lonesome Luke's Wild Women
- Over the Fence as Snitch, Another
- Lonesome Luke Loses Patients
- Pinched
- By the Sad Sea Waves as Snub
- Birds of a Feather
- Bliss as Snub
- From Laramie to London
- Rainbow Island as Snub
- Love, Laughs and Lather
- The Flirt
- Clubs Are Trump
- All Aboard as Passenger with trunk
- We Never Sleep
- Move On
- Bashful as Snub the Butler
- The Big Idea as Snub
- Step Lively
- The Tip
- The Lamb
- Hit Him Again
- Beat It
- A Gasoline Wedding as Snub
- Look Pleasant, Please as Snub
- Here Come the Girls
- Let's Go
- On the Jump as Snoopy Sam - The House Detective
- Follow the Crowd
- Pipe the Whiskers
- It's a Wild Life
- Hey There! as The New Director
- Kicked Out
- The Non-Stop Kid as Snub, the butler
- Two-Gun Gussie as Snub
- Fireman Save My Child
- The City Slicker as Snub
- Sic 'Em, Towser
- Somewhere in Turkey as His Assistant
- Are Crooks Dishonest? as Snub
- An Ozark Romance
- Kicking the Germ Out of Germany
- That's Him
- Triple Trouble as Flop House Tramp
- Bride and Gloom
- Two Scrambled
- Bees in His Bonnet
- Swing Your Partners
- Why Pick on Me? as Harry Ham
- Nothing But Trouble
- Back to the Woods
- Hear 'Em Rave
- Take a Chance as Simplex Joe
- She Loves Me Not
- The Danger Game
- Wanted – $5,000
- Going! Going! Gone! as Snub
- Ask Father as The Corn-Fed Secretary
- On the Fire, aka. The Chef as The Assistant Chef
- I'm on My Way as The Neighbor
- Look Out Below as Snub
- The Dutiful Dub
- Next Aisle Over as The Henpecked Husband
- A Sammy In Siberia as Count Pop-up-skyvitch - the Bolshevik Officer
- Just Dropped In
- Young Mr. Jazz as Snub
- Crack Your Heels
- Ring Up the Curtain, aka. Back-Stage! as The Leading Man
- Si, Senor
- Before Breakfast
- The Marathon as Snub
- Pistols for Breakfast
- Swat the Crook
- Off the Trolley
- Spring Fever as The Unwelcome Suitor
- Billy Blazes, Esq. as Sheriff 'Gun Shy' Gallagher
- Just Neighbors as The Neighbor
- At the Old Stage Door
- Never Touched Me as Jelous Admirer
- A Jazzed Honeymoon
- Count Your Change as Billy Bullion
- Chop Suey & Co.
- Heap Big Chief
- Don't Shove
- Be My Wife
- The Rajah
- He Leads, Others Follow
- Soft Money
- Count the Votes
- Pay Your Dues
- His Only Father
- Bumping Into Broadway as Director of Musical Comedy
- Captain Kidd's Kids as The Valet
- From Hand to Mouth as The Kidnapper
- His Royal Slyness as Prince of Roquefort
- It's a Gift as Inventor Pollard
- The Yokel
- The Doughboy
- Double Trouble
- MItt the Prince
- The Big Shot
- Ex-Flame as Boggins
- The Road to Singapore as Photographer at Birthday Party
- The Strange Love of Molly Louvain
- The Midnight Patrol
- Bars of Hate
- Just My Luck
- Riders of the Rockies
- Tex Rides with the Boy Scouts
- Sing, Cowboy, Sing
- Nation Aflame
- The Utah Trail Pee Wee
- Hollywood Cavalcade
- Phony Express
- Bowery to Broadway
- The Hoodlum Saint
- Miracle on 34th Street as mail-bearing Court Officer
- Back Trail as Goofy
- Johnny Belinda as juror
- Adam's Rib as Man in courtroom
- All About Eve
- Singin' in the Rain as the Man receiving umbrella from Lockwood after song "Singin' in the Rain"
- Limelight as Street Musician
- The Fast and the Furious
- Man of a Thousand Faces
- Heller in Pink Tights
- Twelve Hours to Kill
- Who Was That Lady?
- Inherit the Wind
- Studs Lonigan
- Pepe
- One-Eyed Jacks
- Master of the World
- The Ladies Man
- Homicidal
- The Errand Boy
- Pocketful of Miracles
- Twist Around the Clock
- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance