James Ellison: Another Invisible Man

This is not to slight black author Ralph Ellison, it’s just that I wouldn’t know JAMES Ellison (1910-1993) if I tripped over him — in spite of having seen him in at least a couple of dozen movies, some of which I have watched numerous times.

Ellison vanishes in movies of nearly every major genre. He was mostly associated with westerns. He played Hopalong Cassidy‘s sidekick Johnny Nelson in B movies from 1935 through 1937 and was Buffalo Bill Cody in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936). He was often the male ingenue in comedies, including Zenobia (1939) with Oliver Hardy and Harry Langdon, Fifth Avenue Girl (1939) with Ginger Rogers, Charley’s Aunt (1941) with Jack Benny and Kay Francis, Ice Capades (1941) with Phil Silvers and Barbara Jo Allen, Dixie Dugan (1943) with Lois Andrews and Charlotte Greenwood, and The Ghost Goes Wild (1947). Which makes a nice pivot to his horror films, which includes classics and semi-classics like I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Undying Monster (1942).

Can you picture him now? (cackles, madly wheezing, like Claude Rains).

Ellison started out working in a film lab. Someone from the studios noticed his good looks and gave him a screen test and he passed. And YOU’VE been going to acting classes!

From 1950 through 1952 Ellison starred in a series of low budget westerns for Lippert Pictures, and that rounded out his career. He went into real estate (as so many did and do), although he returned for one last film, the independent feature The Girls Take Over (1962).

In 1937, Ellison married Gertrude Durkin, the sister of Junior Durkin who was killed in a car crash in 1935, during which Jackie Coogan Sr was at the wheel. The Durkins sued the only survivor of the accident, the famous child-star Jackie Coogan. The weird thing is, Coogan later appeared with Ellison in that same 1962 movie The Girls Take Over. Is there a story behind that? Did they just let bygones be bygones? Did they both want a job that badly? Was Coogan helping to pay off some of his karmic debt by lending his name to this independent film, whose only other stars included Ellison, Robert Lowery (from Batman serials), and Marvin Miller, the voice of the robot in Forbidden Planet? Or could it be…that the girls took over?