. . . and more Villains

After all those big screen fights John Wayne had with villains, it turns out that he hit only one --- Mike Mazurki.  It happened while filming "Dakota" when Mike stuck his chin out too far.

What would Wayne have done without all those crabby ol' bad guys?  What would Hoppy, Gene, or Roy have done?

Who would have taken over the towns or rustled the cattle?  Who would have swindled the sweet old ladies out of their land or driven off the farmers?

It figured that Roy Barcroft (in top photo) would play crabby ol' bad guys, he came from a town called Crab.  The crabby ol' bad guy we loved to hate was Harry Woods (sneering at you in the second photo).  He plotted against our heroes for 40 years, appearing only twice as a good guy --- in John Ford's "My Darling Clementine" and Wayne's "Angel and The Badman."

"And if you blinked during either picture you missed me," he said.

Tom Tyler, Hal Taliaferro, and Jack Perrin got more work playing bad guys.  And how about singer-songwriter Glenn Strange? When he wasn't menacing Red Ryder at Republic or Hopalong Cassidy at Paramount, he was the Frankenstein monster at Universal.

But the actor who worked more than anybody was Bud Osborne.  He made anywhere from 600 to 700 westerns, usually playing the first crabby ol' bad guy to get punched (as you see him in the next photo reacting to a doozy thrown by Lash LaRue).

What you see is what you get, he told casting directors, and was a crabby ol' bad guy in westerns until his late 70s.

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