Jack Elam

The Glass Eye That Never Was

Jack Elam's left eye was staring at Cuenca while the right one shot you a killer glare. It wasn't a special effect or a makeup trick. It was the result of a pencil stabbed into his eye during a fight at a Boy Scouts meeting when he was twelve. That crossed-eyed look put food on the table for five decades.

Before stepping in front of the cameras, he worked with numbers. He was an accountant and auditor in Hollywood for people like Samuel Goldwyn or William Boyd. But doctors told him the visual strain of audits would ruin his healthy eyesight. So he decided to try his luck in acting, making the most of his unsettling look.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1949, he debuted in She Shoulda Said No!, but his natural habitat was the desert. He almost always played guys who died in the second act at the hands of whichever hero was in charge. In High Noon (1952) he barely has any lines, but his presence already unsettled viewers from the back of the saloon.

The Accountant Who Became an Outlaw

Sergio Leone chose him to open Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968. It's the famous scene of the fly trapped on the gunslinger's revolver barrel. That sequence was shot in Almería, and Elam didn't need to act much to convey the boredom of the gunslinger under the scorching sun. It was one of the tensest openings in Western history.

Despite his tough-guy image, he was an extremely cultured man and a professional card player. During breaks on set, he would often clean out his castmates in poker games. But his career was about to take a turn no one expected in the offices of the major studios.

Burt Kennedy changed his career path in 1969 with Support Your Local Sheriff!. Kennedy saw that Elam could be extremely funny if he parodied himself. He went from scaring audiences to becoming the comic relief in cowboy movies because he knew how to time visual gags with surgical precision.

The ugliest villain in movies was striking gold.

Redemption Through Laughter

In 1981, he took part in The Cannonball Run alongside Burt Reynolds. He played Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing (a rather eccentric character). It was one of his biggest commercial hits outside the Western genre and proved that his face fit perfectly into the raucous comedies of the 1980s.

But he never forgot his roots in television. He appeared in dozens of series such as The Twilight Zone and Gunsmoke. His work pace was frantic because he knew his face was his only asset. He never turned down a role if the paycheck was big enough.

Jack Elam died in Ashland, Oregon, on October 20, 2003, from heart failure. He was 83 years old and left behind a filmography with more than 200 registered titles.