Prompted by the recent death of Zelda Rubinstein, who starred in the Poltergeist films, Ronald Bergan picks his top 10 big-screen performances by little people
Mon 8 Feb 2010 07.13 EST First published on Mon 8 Feb 2010 07.13 EST
Poltergeist
The death of Zelda Rubinstein, celebrated for her role as the clairvoyant in the three movies, was a reminder of the position of shorter people in film. The 1.3m (4ft 3in) Rubinstein, who was active in campaigning for greater acceptance and dignity for diminutive actors, said: 'It's absolutely despicable the way little people are used as comic relief or as grotesques in movies. You're not an actor if you're just a person that fits into a cute costume. You're a prop.'Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
An unusual physique will inevitably restrict casting options for an actor. However, although dwarves have often been associated with black humour, the gothic and the bizarre, they have been treated, on the whole, with sensitivity. Cinema has never really faced the questions asked by the heroine in Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget (1921): 'How many times have I vainly speculated what inward difference being a human creature of my dimensions really makes. What is – deep, deep in – at variance between Man and Midget?' But there have been moments, between the Munchkins and Hobbits, that hopefully cause audiences to re-evaluate their concept of normalityPhotograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)
In a way, this is an anti-horror movie. It urges the spectator not to be repulsed by the parade of monsters – a trunkless man, pinheads and dwarves. The film warns us that 'but for an accident of birth you may be as they are'. German-born Harry Earles, who was in both versions of Browning’s The Unholy Three (1925, 1930), plays Tweedledee, who falls in love and marries a tall trapeze artist, who then publicly humiliates him and tries to kill him. The 'freaks' are never sentimentalised and they wreak a terrible revenge on the two 'normal' people who cross them. One of the great scenes in the movie is the post-wedding feast, when the freaks confront the bride by chanting, 'Gooble Gobble. We accept her. One of us'Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Zéro de conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933)
Vigo's iconoclastic masterpiece is set in a dreadful boarding school where four boys organise an uprising against the petty restrictions imposed on them. Among the absurd authority figures is the tiny headmaster, played by Delphin (real name Jules Sirveaux). He has a long beard and wears a large top hat. In his office, he keeps the hat like a relic under a glass dome on the mantelpiece, which he can barely reach. Delphin killed himself in 1938, prefiguring the suicide of his fellow Frenchman Hervé Villechaize, who had leading roles in Fantasy Island and The Man With the Golden Gun (1974)Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
Munchkinland is the first place Dorothy arrives in her Technicolor dream. According to Hugh Fordin in The World of Entertainment (1975), the 124 midgets were 'an unholy assemblage of pimps, hookers and gamblers who infested the Metro lot and all of the community. They played with knives, propositioned the stars, chased the lot’s showgirls and provided the cast with outrageous anecdotes'Photograph: MGM/Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
At the Circus (Edward Buzzell, 1939)
Apart from the elementary mistake of putting the Marx Brothers in a circus – a college, an opera house or a luxury liner are much better settings for their anarchic antics – this film has some hilarious routines. Among the best is Chico and Harpo’s visit to little Professor Atom’s room, which is scaled to accommodate only someone of his size. Played by Jerry Maren, who was the Munchkin that handed Dorothy the welcoming lollipop in The Wizard of Oz, Atom sports a moustache and chomps on a cigar almost as big as he isPhotograph: MGM/Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
L'éternel retour (Jean Delannoy, 1943)
Jean Cocteau's updating of the Tristan and Iseult legend has Achille (Piéral), a vicious dwarf, as the deus ex machina. Achille, in a plot to poison the couple, gives them a love potion in error. Made during the German occupation of France, the film draws an uncomfortable contrast between the Aryan lovers and the dark dwarf. Piéral would appear over 30 years later in Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), as the gossipy psychologist on the trainPhotograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Nazarín (Luis Buñuel, 1959)
Buñuel used dwarves and other people with disabilities to express his loathing of the sentimentality that surrounds deformity. Jesús Fernández, who also appeared in Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert (1965), plays a lascivious dwarf whose sexual advances to a prostitute are happily accepted. They are the odd travelling companions of Nazarín (Francisco Rabal), a humble and unworldly priest attempting to live by the precepts of Christianity who is despised for his painsPhotograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)
While his mother (Gunnel Lindblom) and aunt (Ingrid Thulin) indulge in sex, a 10-year-old boy (Jörgen Lindström) wanders along the corridors of a seemingly empty, gloomy and cavernous hotel. However, the boy comes across a troupe of dwarf vaudevillians who invite him into their room, put a dress on him and try to entertain him. It is the one joyful sequence in Bergman’s dark, passionate and disturbing film, though it fits with the theme of contrasts: complexity v simplicity, innocence v corruption, abnormality v normalityPhotograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Ship of Fools (Stanley Kramer, 1965)
Michael Dunn, as the cynical dwarf narrator of this allegorical film, was the first smaller actor to gain an Academy award nomination. He is not only the conscience of the film, but the audience’s surrogate. Addressing the camera at the beginning, he declares: 'My name is Carl Glocken, and this is a ship of fools. I'm a fool. You'll meet more fools as we go along. This tub is packed with them. Emancipated ladies and ballplayers. Lovers. Dog lovers. Ladies of joy. Tolerant Jews. Dwarves. All kinds. And who knows – if you look closely enough, you may even find yourself on board!' Dunn has a fine exchange with the 1.88m (6ft 2in) Lee Marvin, who calls him 'a sawed-off intellectual'Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Even Dwarves Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970)
A group of dwarves living in a penal institution on a bleak island take advantage of the governor’s absence to indulge in an escalating series of acts of rebellion and destruction. Herzog, literally scaling down all human vanities and pretensions, presents another parable of outsiders who refuse or are unable to conform to a limited social structure. For this blackly comic microcosm of society, Herzog put his cast through the wringer, especially the character called Hombré, who is made to laugh until it becomes painful and meaninglessPhotograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981)
Six time-travelling thieving dwarves capture a boy and whiz him through the history of the world. This inventive film’s main characters are the bunch of avaricious dwarves, led by David Rappaport as Randall, who Gilliam can’t help making endearing. The 1.96m (6ft 5in) John Cleese, as Robin Hood, asks one of the dwarves: 'How long have you been a robber?' 'Four foot one,' comes the replyPhotograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
