Charles Lane 1905 - 2007

With all the titans of cinema dropping like flies the past few weeks, the death of Charles Lane on July 9 flew under my radar. Allow me to make amends to the man who was America's oldest living actor. He was 102; his final credit was as a narrator for the 2006 short "The Night Before Christmas."

You don't think you know who Lane was, but you do. If you've ever watched an old movie, there's a good chance he was in it. If you ever watched any of Lucille Ball's TV shows or most of the sitcoms of the 1960s, the percentage was even higher. Lane played grumpy neighbors and nosy reporters, and that's often how the movies he appeared in credited him. He was the quintessential character actor -- skinny as a post, glasses glinting over a beaky nose, lips as thin as a parson -- and his job was simple: say the lines, make an impression, let the hero get back to saving the world.

Because of his ubiquity, though -- IMDb credits him with 236 movie appearances and 104 TV episodes, and that's probably a conservative count -- we came to know Lane better than many above-the-title stars. People came up to him all the time, convinced he was someone they knew from back home, and in a way they were right -- he was a fixture of that fluid small-town America that lived in the movies, a consensual fantasy created by Hollywood and shared by millions. Lane was the guy leaning against the lamp-post by the general store, the acerbic sharpie. Chances were he might give you a ticket or at least a piece of his mind. Maybe worse: In Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," he's the hatchetfaced functionary who collects rent for Lionel Barrymore's mean Mr. Potter.

That's right -- Charles Lane was the original Smithers.

Here's the Times obit, and a nice appreciation by Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle. (Lane was a born San Franciscan and in fact was one of the last survivors of the 1906 earthquake. He also was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild, which makes sense: If ever someone needed a union, it was a studio character actor in the 1930s.)

A documentary bio, "You Know the Face," was already in production at the time of his death. You could argue that such a bio already exists, scattered in pieces across hundreds of movies and TV shows.

Goodbye, Charlie. We knew you thought we were a bunch of suckers, but we loved you anyway.