It isn’t just the eye, though goodness knows the eye is distinctive enough. (Apparently, someone threw a pencil during a fight at a Boy Scout troop meeting when he was twelve, stabbing him in the eye and causing him to lose his sight in it.) His whole face was craggy and uneven enough so that I’m honestly not entirely sure if some of the images that come back when you do a search are stretched or not. And since even at the height of his career, he was still basically a second banana most of the time, my mental image of his face isn’t as clear as my mental image of, say, James Garner, even though I picture them together most of the time I picture Jack Elam at all. I think, though, that he would’ve understood; he knew he was a second banana and probably would’ve just been surprised that I picture him as a good guy.
He started out in Hollywood as an accountant. It turned out, though, that staring at all those ledgers for Hopalong Cassidy’s company was putting too much strain on his good eye, and he would’ve gone blind if he’d kept at it. So he got himself contracted to be in three movies in exchange for finding financing. I don’t think I’ve seen The Sundowners (actually Elam’s third movie), but it apparently did well enough to launch his career, mostly playing heavies and sidekicks of heavies.
As a child, I would’ve seen him in The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, where he’s the villain, but where I will always think of him is the cheerful but not very bright Jake, deputy to the wry and far smarter Jason McCullough in Support Your Local Sheriff. (He’s in Support Your Local Gunfighter, too, but I’ve never liked that one as much.) Jake’s a simple fellow, and he’s intended to be a bit of a parallel to the dumb-as-a-brick Joe Danby, played by still-alive Bruce Dern. And yet even though Jake’s still pretty dumb himself, he has a root sensibility that grounds him more than most of the rest of the cast in that movie, which is also part of the joke.
Is he the straight man in that movie? Well, yes and no; arguably, everyone is the straight man in that movie, because it’s one of those comedies where the people in the movie don’t know they’re funny for the most part. And yet Elam also gets to deliver some really funny lines, such as when he’s explaining his family history to the sheriff and is clearly hopeful that having a grandfather who was hanged for horse stealing will get him out of what he’s clearly got pegged as a job that’s going to get him killed. Also the fact that he had an earlier job as a horse-holder at Madame Orr’s house. That’s a funny job—he was basically a human hitching post.
Unfortunately, I do tend to think of that movie every time I see Jack Elam, which makes appearances in things like Once Upon a Time in the West lose a bit of their impact, because in my head, he’s muttering “sixty fer who and forty fer who?” in surly tones. Still, he was a fine character actor, one of the many who did well with the popularity of the Western. What with TV and movies, he has about 200 credits, including a full season of a TV show. He was a hardworking guy. Not to mention one of the most beloved characters in Western folklore.
