It’s little wonder many in Hollywood dismissed Victor Mature as a block of brainless beefcake when he landed at Hal Roach’s Culver City studio complex in the summer of 1939 – after all, one of the primary practitioners of anti-Mature humour was Victor himself. Case in point: the oft-repeated claim he responded to a rejected application to join the Los Angeles Country Club – because they wouldn’t accept actors as members – with “Hell, I’m no actor and I’ve got 28 pictures and a scrapbook of reviews to prove it!” (This is the version he offered the New York Times in December 1971; the number of movies changed dependent upon audience or stage in his career, but the joke remained the same).
“I’m the most hated man in Hollywood,” he told infamously dirt-dishing journalist Kirtley Baskette in a May 1942 interview for Modern Screen, but Baskette (who had made plenty of enemies himself three years earlier by spilling the beans on Tinsel Town’s more intimately involved unmarried couples) seems to have fallen for the Mature charm, describing at some length the hard work required to create “the most fabulous personal legend since Valentino”.
The actor made no secret of his game plan: daily publicity stunts (such as cycling around the Twentieth Century-Fox lot wearing a pair of overalls emblazoned with the word ‘Genius’), high-profile dinner dates with top-rank starlets (no gentleman, Victor interrupted one liaison with Lana Turner to ask her to get him Betty Grable’s telephone number when he spotted her at a neighbouring table, then took Betty out the following evening) and a steely focus upon his own career.
Ironically, Victor’s efforts to be taken seriously as an actor would always be undermined by his early screen success. The son of an Italian immigrant who set up a knife-sharpening business in Louisville, Kentucky, he studied and performed at the Pasadena Community Playhouse for three years before being spotted in 1939 by former Universal vice-president Charles R Rogers, who recommended him to producer Hal Roach as “a rival to Clark Gable, Robert Taylor and Errol Flynn”, earning Victor a seven-year contract and a lead role opposite Carole Landis and Lon Chaney Jr in the 1940 prehistoric drama One Million B.C. Although the New York Times considered it “a masterpiece of imaginative fiction”, Variety dubbed the movie “corny” and acid-tongued gossip columnist Hedda Hopper dismissed Mature as “a sort of miniature Johnny Weissmuller” (a trifle cruel, given he was only one-and-a-half inches shorter than the Tarzan star’s 6’3”).
Fortunately, Victor was able to ditch his loincloth almost immediately, when RKO borrowed him for the musical No, No, Nanette, starring British actress Anna Neagle and directed by her future husband Herbert Wilcox. Still concerned over typecasting – “Nobody was going to believe I could do anything except grunt and groan,” he told LA Times ‘Critic at Large’ Charles Champlin – Victor headed for New York City, where he was cast as Gertrude Lawrence’s film star boyfriend in the stage musical ‘Lady in the Dark’. The curtain went up in January 1941 and the production proved a massive hit, eliciting some warm reviews for Victor’s performance, even if his character’s description as “a beautiful hunk of man” would haunt him at regular intervals over the next quarter-century.
As Hal Roach’s output was relatively small, he sold half of his remaining interest in Mature’s contact to Twentieth Century-Fox (RKO had already purchased a full fifty-percent stake in 1940), meaning Roach received $3750 per week when the actor played a scheming gigolo in the noir thriller The Shanghai Gesture (1941), whilst Victor still took home a mere $450. In November 1941, to Mature’s relief, Roach’s ongoing financial difficulties allowed Fox to take over the outstanding share; it cost them $80,000 and included a pay rise for their new star, who would now earn a weekly $1500. “The studio will have to make a success of me,” ran a quote in the New York Times, but less than a month later, America – and most of Hollywood – entered the Second World War. Despite the US Navy rejecting him for colour blindness, Victor managed to enlist in the US Coast Guard the following July, inadvertently ruling himself out of the 1944 screen adaptation of ‘Lady in the Dark’ and effectively putting his career on hold for more than three years.
Fortunately, Victor re-entered civilian life with an honourable military discharge, a newly-signed two-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox and a fresh determination to be taken seriously in his profession, and John Ford gave that a massive boost by casting him as ailing gunfighter Doc Holliday in My Darling Clementine (1946), opposite Henry Fonda’s equally battle-scarred Wyatt Earp. Studio production chief Darryl Zanuck considered it Mature’s finest performance (a view echoed by Observer film critic Philip French in 2015) and promised Victor a break from lightweight musical roles as a reward, assigning him to a series of dark thrillers: 1947’s Moss Rose (in which he co-starred with British actress Peggy Cummins and, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, earned himself a $50,000 bonus), Kiss of Death (developed with Mature in mind as the tragic lead) and Cry of the City (1948, playing a hard-boiled cop hunting killer Richard Conte).
Typically, just as Victor was gaining recognition for these heavyweight performances, Fox lent him to Paramount for Cecil B DeMille’s lavish $3.5m production of Samson and Delilah (1949, with Hedy Lamarr brandishing the scissors) and his first musical in seven years, Red, Hot and Blue, which proved anything but hot at the box office. Luckily, Samson and Delilah scored as the decade’s most popular movie, raking in $12m on its first release alone.
Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Victor was back in sandals: a Roman captain in Androcles and the Lion (1952), a guilt-ridden Roman tribune in the Biblical epic The Robe (1953) and its sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), Tutankhamun’s military chief in The Egyptian (1954) and even mounting an elephant as Hannibal (1959). Rather than struggle against the tide, Victor decided to slide into retirement and reached for his golf clubs.
“I loaf very gracefully, he told the New York Times in 1971, “There’s a lot to be said about loafing if you know how to do it gracefully.” Lured away from his regular seven hours per day on the golf course near his home in San Diego County to play an ageing mobster in the comedy Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972), he wistfully recalled the days when he attempted to “shake up” the studios with his antics: “Hollywood was wonderful in the Forties. Fox was like a country club. The days of shaking them up are over. It’s like a factory now.”
[A version of this article appeared in Yours Retro #73, April 2024]