I really feel that his role in "Five Came Back" was a career highlight for Joseph Calleia. He never disappoints in any of his screen appearances, but was outstanding as Vasquez. Certainly worthy of a supporting award nomination in that legendary year of 1939.
"It's as red as The Daily Worker and just as sore."
I agree; a really solid actor at the level of non-verbal expression in several films, including "Touch of Evil" as Orson Welles's sorrowful toady 19 years down the road. Hardly anyone recalls him as Dr. Enrico Fermi, the first man to set up a run an atomic pile in Hollywood's first telling of how they built the bomb in "The Beginning of the End," or as "El Sordo" in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," but he's a minor standout as the wry detective in "Gilda."
shareAlmost nine years on, I just had to agree. He knocks this one out of the park. He really takes that character on a trip for us; we don't really know who he is until the last reel. The final act belongs to him and Aubrey Smith. Wonderful.
shareI agree, too. Joseph Calleia was a brilliant actor and, strangely, as he has a fine filmography, the B Five Came Back is a movie he walks off with and becomes the virtual star of in its final fifteen minutes or thereabout. His character had been "growing" for some time, and when he reveals his true self, while it's not a shock or a huge surprise it comes as a kind of Epiphany all the same; and as one's sympathies shift to him and we see the feet of the cannibals moving about in he underbrush and ponder his character's fate one can't but feel one's heart sink.
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