Huntz Hall died on Saturday,
January 30, 1999, at the age of 78. Largely forgotten by today's generation, Hall was
vastly underrated as a comic and a sidekick from the 1930s to the 1950s.
One of 14 children, Hall grew up in New York City. In the 1937 film, Dead
End, directed by William Wyler and starring Joel McCrea and Humphrey Bogart, the
"Dead End Kids" were introduced to the world. This introduction spawned a
regimen of "Dead End Kids" films. Then, at Universal, they became the "East
Side Kids." Later, it was off to Monogram Pictures where they would metamorphose into
the Bowery Boys and make 49 pictures! Their last film was made in 1958, called In the
Money. One of their most memorable movies was a Western spoof entitled Bowery
Buckaroos, shot in 1947.
The evolution of Hall's character is something to marvel -- from a
tough, sarcastic young hooligan in the '30s and mid'40s , to the naive, bumbling, teddy
bear of a guy replete with popout eyes and an upturned baseball cap often wearing a suit
in the late '40s and '50s. As the character, "Sach," Hall was the perfect foil
to the malapropos Leo Gorcey.
In 1971, Hall starred in a television series of his own alongside Mike
Mazurki, in The Chicago Teddy Bears. |
