Villain of the Month: Arthur Space
A popular character actor, Arthur Space had a long and varied career that span close to forty years. He started appearing in film with Riot Squad (1941), he also appeared in Andy Hardy’s Double Life (1942), Laurel and Hardy’s The Big Noise (1944), Leave It to Blondie (1945 and The Pale Face (1948). His first serial appearance was as a minor character in Universal’s Lost City of the Jungle (1946), playing a professional gambler who turns out to actually be an undercover agent helping the heroes stop Lionel Atwill.
Space would not return to serials again until Republic’s Government Agents vs. the Phantom Legion (1951) where he was one of four shipping business owners suspected of secretly leading a gang of hijackers. Next Republic cast Space as a foreign agent setting up a secret missile base in the Canadian Northwest in Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders (1953). Space’s final serial was Panther Girl of the Kongo (1955), where he played a mad scientist who was creating giant crawdads to scare natives away from his secret diamond mine.
Some of his other film work includes The Spoilers (1955), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), A Summer Place (1959), The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) and The Swarm (1978). He also become a familar face on TV appearing in Adventures of Superman, Perry Mason, Bonanza, Ironside, Emergency!, Kojak and The Waltons. His only TV series was in the series adaptation of National Velvet, play Velvet’s father.
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