Hero of the Month: Tom Ricketts
Character actor Tom Ricketts shares a unique distinction with an Oscar winning actor. Like Walter Brennan he has been perpetually cast as the old guy, even in his youth. Spanning a career that went from the beginnings of film up to the end of the thirties, this Shakespearian actor was usually listed in the credits as either Old Man or The Butler.
He was also a director of short subjects durinng the silent days, with an impressive list of titles from 1910 to 1919 as Thomas R Ricketts. His list of acting cresits is just as impressive with appearances in Bulldog Drummond (1929), Top Hat (1935), Dead End (1937) and Son of Frankenstein (1939). His most memorable parts are the old farmer who discovers Claude Rains in his barn at the end of The Invisible Man (1933) and the butler who tells William Powell to “Walk this way,” in After the Thin Man (1936).
Ricketts did some serial work in the early thirties. Danger Island (1931) cast Ricketts as the heroine’s father, looking for radium in the African jungle. He also appeared in a couple of Buck Jones serials. In Gordon of Ghost City (1933) he played the heroine’s crippled father who has a secret mine he is protecting and demonstrates he can still shoot the tail feathers off a buzzard at a hundred yards in a couple of mid chapter shoot outs. His other serial appearance was as a judge in the beginning of The Red Rider (1935), who wrongly convicts Jones’ friend of murder and then fires Jones for letting him escape.
