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Today, the actor Frankie Darro is largely forgotten. Sci-fi
know-it-alls might know that he was one of two men operating Robby
the Robot in 1956's
Forbidden Planet, there might even be
some fans of early TV-comedy who know he was the Little Old Lady on the
Red Skelton Show, and fans of early science fiction and Western might
still remember him from Phantom
Empire in 1935, playing alongside Gene Autry, whose first starring
role this was. But while Autry was relatively new to the film business,
Darro, at age 18, was already a veteran, having appeared in movies for 11
years ... Frankie Darro was born Frank Johnson in 1917 to a
couple of aerialists with the Sells Floto Circus known as the Flying
Johnsons. As soon as Frankie was barely old enough to, father Johnson
tried to train his son as an aerialist as well, but alas, young Frankie
was afraid of heights - however his time with the circus trained him in
quite a few other capacities he could use in stuntwork later on ... In
1922, when the circus was out in California, Frankie's parents split up, and
that was the end of the Flying Johnsons ... However, back then, in
California the film business was booming, and young kids who could do
their own stunts were in steady demand, and soon Frankie Johnson had a
contract with Ince's film studio, his name was changed to Darro, and he
played in films like Half-A-Dollar Bill (1924, directed by W.S.Van
Dyke) and Judgement of the
Storm (1924, Del Andrews), and in 1925 he even had a (small) role alongside Greta Garbo
and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown). Soon, Frankie
found himself at FBO and was promoted to sidekick duties in a
series of Tom Tyler Westerns [Tom
Tyler bio - click here]. By the end of the silent era, Frankie
had even
made it to lead character in the films Little Mickey Grogan (1927,
James Leo Meehan) and The Circus Kid (1928, George B.Seitz, Josiah Zuro).
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Interestingly enough,
Frankie seems to have disappeared withthe advent of sound film, as he
didn't shoot any films in 1929 and 1930. In 1931 though he was back, in
William A.Wellman's early gangster epos Public Enemy, chronicling
the life of (fictional) gangsters Tom Powers (James Cagney) and Matt
Doyle (Edward Woods). Darro plays Edward Woods as a boy, with fellow kid
actor Frank 'Junior' Coghlan playing a young James Cagney. A role
alongside John Barrymore and a pre-star Boris Karloff [Boris
Karloff bio - click here] in The Mad
Genius (1931, Michael Curtiz) soon followed, as well as 2 roles in socially engaging films in
1933, Mayor of Hell (1933, Archie Mayo) with James Cagney, which can be regarded as a
precurser to the Dead End Kids flicks, and Wild Boys of
the Road (1933, William A. Wellman), a bleak look at Depression Era America.
Soon
though, Frankie found a niche of his own, playing in Mascot
serials: In The Vanishing Legion (1931, Ford L. Beebe, B. Reeves
Eason) and The
Devil Horse (1932, Otto Brower) he
co-starred with Harry Carey, The Lightning Warrior
(1931, Benjamin H.Kline, Armand Schaefer) saw him
alongside Rin Tin Tin, in The Wolf Dog (1933, Colbert Clark, Harry
L.Fraser), Rin Tin Tin's less-talented
son Rin Tin Tin jr was his partner, and in Laughing at Life (1933,
Ford L.Beebe - one
of the few Mascot
features of its time), Frankie played second fiddle to Victor McLaglen,
and so on ... [For an article on Mascot,
please click here.] Frankie was of course perfect for the serials: He
could do his own stunts and some acrobatics, ride with the best of them, and
even showed some acting talent - he could burst into tears at the
tip of a hat, and to exploit that talent, he is orphaned incredibly
often in his movies and serials.
1935 saw probably Frankie
Darro's most famous role, as the juvenile sidekick of Gene Autry in Phantom
Empire (Otto Brower, B. Reeves Eason). Even though Frankie was 18 at the time, he had to play a
boy around 12 years old, and does so quite convincingly - even if
12-year-old know-it-alls in general are quite a nuisance in films, and Frankie's character should be no exception. Soon after
finishing Phantom Empire
though, Mascot
[Mascot history - click here] merged with Monogram,
Liberty, Majestic, Chesterfield/Invincible
and the film developing outfit Consolidated Film Laboratories to
form the new company Republic
[Republic history - click here],
and Frankie had to realize that for some reason, he was no
longer in heavy demand ...
In 1936 however, Frankie Darro found
work with Maurice Conn's Conn
Pictures, where he finally, in a series of 6 pictures with Kane
Richmond, where he, at age 19, was finally
allowed to move away from playing daredevil kids and mature to more grown-up roles.
The Conn-films
however were no revelation, cheaply made thrillers invariably of the
B-variety that somehow lacked the spark of Frankie's work with Mascot.
Thus it was no great loss when Frankie's association with Conn
Pictures came to an end in 1937, even if his first few films with
second generation Monogram
(shortly after the split from Republic)
did not seem much more promising, initial titles like Wanted by the
Police and Tough Kid (both 1938, Howard Bretherton) and Boys'
Reformatory (1939, Howard Bretherton) were little more than your usual
B-thrillers comparable to those produced by Conn.
All that would change in 1939 though, but more about that a little further
down ...
Besides
his other screenwork, Frankie was also often seen playing jockeys
(sometimes only in bit-parts) in films like Broadway Bill
(1934, Frank Capra), The Payoff (1935, Robert Florey), Charlie Chan at the Race
Track (1936, H. Bruce Humberstone), or the Marx
Brothers-vehicle A Day at the Races (1937, Sam Wood),
a role that would also stick to Frankie throughout
his career due to his riding talents and his characteristically (for a
jockey) short stature.
It was in 1939 that Frankie really came
to his own at Monogram
in Irish Luck
(Howard Bretherton), the first in a series that had Frankie teamed up
with exceptional black comedian Mantan Moreland (click
here for films from the Frankie and Mantan-series) [click
here for a Mantan Moreland-biography]. All
of the films are mystery-farces with Frankie and Mantan as a duo of
unlikely amateur detectives, in which Frankie was allowed to show quite
some talent for comedy, and above all, at age 22 he was finally allowed
to play characters his own age. (In 1940 though, Darro made another kid
appearance, so to say, when he voiced Lampwick, the naughty boy who got
turned into a donkey, in Walt Disney's animated Pinocchio [Hamilton
Luske, Ben Sharpsteen].)
With films like those from the
Frankie
and Mantan-series, Frankie could have easily made it to a
recognizeable and bankable matinee-idol, but fate intervened, in the
form of World War II, where Frankie did service with the Navy.
After
the war, Frankie would return to America, and to Monogram,
who, starting with Junior Prom (arthur Dreifuss) in 1946, gave Frankie a role in
another series, The TeenAgers. and while The
TeenAgers may in retrospect be groundbreaking in some respect,
predating the teen-movies of the 1950's by quite some years - though the
series itself was clearly inspired by the popular Archie-comics -,
Frankie's career did not quite pick up where it has left off: First of
all, Frankie's role in The TeenAgers was merely an important
supporting character (mostly, he was sixth-billed on these films), and at
age 29, and after having fought a regular war, he is back to playing ...
a teenager. Eventually, The TeenAgers too came to
an end, and Frankie found himself pretty much out of demand. He did
supporting duty on 4 Bowery Boys films -
Angels' Alley (1948, William Beaudine),
Trouble Makers (1948, Reginald Le Borg), Fighting Fools and
Hold That Baby!
(both 1949, Reginald Le Borg) -,
again at Monogram,
but by the late 1940's/ early 1950's, his filmroles got more infrequent, and
smaller too, to a point that he wasn't even mentioned in the
credits. That by that time, Frankie was a heavy drinker, didn't help too
much either, and even though Frankie tried to fight his alcoholism, he
thought it a good idea to open his own bar, ironically titled Try Later
- after the reply he was given most often when he was asking Central Casting
for work.
In 1956, Frankie was chosen to be the actor inside Robby
the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956, Fred
M. Wilcox), perhaps not a big role for a
professional actor, as it merely involved moving around one big piece of
(pseudo-)machinery, but it would provide food on the table. However, soon
the machinery grew too heavy for Frankie to move, and he had to be
replaced by someone else. In the 1950's too, when Frankie was
already known for his alcoholism, comedian Red Skelton, himself a reformed
alcoholic, decided to give Frankie a chance to play the Little Old Lady on
the
Red Skelton Show, granted a silly role in drag, but Frankie was
allowed to develop a few slapstick routines since the lady had to do more and
more amazing and hilarious pratfalls ... however, due to his
continuing drinking problems, Frankie was eventually removed from the
show. In the 1960's and 1970's, Frankie Darro's film roles
grew even fewer and less important, mostly supporting work for
television. It is a bitter irony that Frankie's very last role was that of
a town drunk in the little known mystery Fugitive Lovers (John
Carr) in 1975. Frankie's death from a heart attack
on Christmas Day 1976 (at age 59) went by almost unnoticed.
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