Brix and Mortar

Here’s another one from the archives (vintage 2007), rescued from oblivion by my pal Gilbert.  Per Arthur Miller, “Attention must be paid,” even if belatedly.

I was shocked and saddened this morning [March 30] to learn of the recent death of Herman Brix at the impressive age of 100.  “Who the hell is Herman Brix?” I hear you ask.  Well, you might know him better—if you know him at all—as Bruce Bennett, the name under which he made most of his hundred-plus film and TV appearances.  But, to take things chronologically, it was Olympic shot-put medalist Brix who was hand-picked by Edgar Rice Burroughs to play his most famous creation in the serial The New Adventures of Tarzan, later broken down into two features.

It’s no classic, hampered by a low budget and production woes while filming in the Amazon (or some similarly godforsaken place), but Brix is far closer to ERB’s conception of the Ape Man than Johnny Weismuller, who found a success in the role that Herman did not.  So, Brix became Bennett, and continued laboring in the Hollywood vineyards for forty-odd years, carving out a modest career in supporting roles, mostly in films even I have never heard of.

I first encountered him in Bogart films like Sahara, Dark Passage and—most notably—The Treasure of the Sierre Madre.  But I submit that the quintesential Bennett role, also from his tenure at Warner Brothers, was the first husband of Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce (a movie I highly recommend, by the way).  Bennett’s flawed but basically decent guy wasn’t a showy part, yet it was the type that helps form the mortar holding a great film together, and proves that he deserved better than the relative obscurity in which he died…not to mention having to star in films like The Alligator People later in his career.

That was a rare horror/SF role, although he did appear in two of Boris Karloff’s mad doctor movies, Before I Hang and The Man with Nine Lives, plus five episodes of the pioneering Science Fiction Theatre, The Cosmic Man and—in a dismal 1973 swan song—The Clones.  What makes me the saddest is that after an absence from the screen of more than thirty years, I’d always assumed he was long dead, meanwhile rhapsodizing to my daughter, Alexandra, about how he was so underappreciated.  If I’d known he was alive, I might’ve tried to get a letter to the guy.  Let this be that belated letter for him.