Hero of the Month: Robert Bice
I sometimes wonder if during the Golden Age of Hollywood, it was better to have a studio contract or to freelance. I know that Lon Chaney, Jr. struggled for years until he got a contract with Universal and then became so well known that he continued to work in character roles for years after he was let go by the studio in the late forties. Robert Shayne gave up a studio contract and struggled for the rest of his career. Tom London never had a studio contract and worked continuously for decades. is it talent, luck or some combination of the two that differentiates these three men ? I don’t know.
Robert Bice seems to follow in London’s footsteps, a character actor who worked continuously in films with no studio affiliation. Starting in the early forties, Bice worked on poverty row productions like Monogram’s The Ghost and the Guest (1943), an early screen writing credit for comedian Morey Amsterdam, while also appearing in major film productions like Dragon Seed (1944). Other film roles include Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947), Captive Women (1952), The Ten Commandments (1956) and It! the terror From beyond Space (1958). His TV work spanned The Lone Ranger, I Love Lucy, Peter Gunn, Burkes’s Law and The Wild Wild West.
But for serial fans he will always be Frank James in Republic’s The james Brothers of Missouri (1949), the studio’s third and final reworking of the infamous western outaws into good bad men trying to redeam themselves. This time around they help the sister of a former gang member trying to etablish a freightline that is being sabotaged by an unscrupulous rival. Bice later made a small appearance in Republic’s Trader Tom of the China Seas (1954), which was pretty much it for his serial career.
