Gene Roth 1903-1976 By Barry Brown

The word ‘Dependables’ has become, in film jargon, the popular term for those character actors whose faces we know but whose names we don’t. Among this generally unheralded group, few were more recognizable than a husky, towering (6’2”) player named Gene Roth who, despite the fact he didn’t begin a serious acting career until he was forty, managed to appear in over 150 movies and nearly 250 television shows in less than twenty-five years. Such an extensive list of credits hardly encourages exclusive identification of an actor with a particular type of film, but Roth’s association with the fantasy genre was more than fleeting.

Eugene Edward Oliver Stutenroth was born in Redfield, South Dakota on January 8, 1903, the youngest of three sons of Eugene Stutenroth, a professional gambler of German descent, and Anna Christina Olsen, a dressmaker of Swedish ancestry. When Gene was two years old, his father deserted the family and Anna had to manage alone. In 1917, she moved with her sons to the nearby town of Clarke and, finally, to Minneapolis, where Gene graduated from West High School in 1920.

One of Roth’s first experiences with acting recalls an interestingly unexplored aspect of the American movie industry’s side-effects on its patrons. An ingenious promoter by the name of Tom Ward devised a peripatetic operation wherein he would arrive in a small town, rent an auditorium or meeting-hall and present a film he had made (with a small initial investment) of juvenile players enacting a skit. Ward then would claim he was a talent scout based in Hollywood who was auditioning local youngsters for possible careers in the burgeoning profession. Those who auditioned and were approved were then given (for a small fee, of course) a ‘screen test’, usually composed of some melodramatic mystery piece. Ward would then pocket the money and he himself to the next town, pulling the same spiel, using the film from the last town, leaving anxious parents waiting on tenterhooks to hear from Hollywood. Gene remembered this bit of lore because, as a high school student, he played a detective in one of Ward’s ‘tests’.

After graduation in 1921, young Stutenroth took a job as an assistant theatre manager at the Orpheum Theatre in Duluth, one of the Pantages-circuit combination vaudeville and movie houses. Vaudeville was dying out, but along with a silent feature and a short, live acts were still part of the attraction and often times Gene would act as emcee of the presentations and began to travel from place to place with the theatre chain. From Duluth, he went to a theatre in Omaha, then returned to Minneapolis to become an usher at a theatre where he met and married the chief usherette. The marriage ended in annulment, however, when it was found she had no final divorce decree from her previous spouse. In August of 1922, Roth headed for California to take a job at the Mission Theatre in Los Angeles.

For the next two years, Gene worked at various cinemas in southern California and, during this period, landed his first filmwork, though he had no serious intentions of becoming an actor.

Work for screen extras was readily available and Roth made his screen debut in a two-reel comedy for Mack Sennett. Besides other comedies, his other bits during this period included an appearance as one of the crowd in the flogging scene of Lon Chaney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923); a guard in Merry-Go-Round (1923) and a bit in the Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood (1922).

In 1924, one Velda Parsons became his second wife and she bore him a daughter, Rosemarie. The marriage, however, lasted but a year. Following the divorce, Gene decided to do something he’d thought about for a long time --- seek out and meet face-to-face his father. He knew the elder Roth was living in Aberdeen, Washington, so Gene chucked his job and arrived there in February, 1925. What he saw was a disappointment. The old man was still a gambler and lived in a hotel which doubled as a whorehouse. Nevertheless, he stayed on for several months, fending off the passes of the girls. “I was very idealistic about a gal”, he recalled in a 1976 interview. “If it wasn’t true love, I didn’t want it”.

During his stay in Washington, Roth learned to build pipe organs for the Estey Organ Company of Tacoma. It was a trade that would later prove valuable. But he also had a brief stint as, of all things, a fight manager. Having met, through his father, a boxing promoter named Edward Eager, Gene landed a job as manager of one of Eager’s top clients, Leo Lomski, then the Pacific Coast Middleweight Champ. With the boxer, Roth again wound up in Los Angeles. When that association ended in 1926, Gene headed for Chicago and thence to New York.

For the next four years, Roth built and installed pipe organs for the Aeolian Company. He was particularly fond of recounting the time when, over a period of three months, he installed an organ in the summer home of Walter Chrysler, the auto magnate, at Port Washington, Long Island. Chrysler, observing Roth’s meticulous and careful labor, complimented him warmly as one of the few men he’d seen who treated his work with respect.

Gene acquired his third wife in 1927, a Broadway dancer-actress named Helen Mack. By her he had a son, Eugene Arthur. This marriage lasted seven years.

The stock market crash in 1929 dissipated the demand for luxury items such as pipe organs. Consequently, by ’31, Roth was back as a theatre manager, this time at Loew’s in New York. The following year he remained a manager, working variously in New York or Pennsylvania. In 1934, when his divorce from Helen Mack became final, he married his fourth and last wife, Dorothy Biddle.

One especially interesting anecdote concerning Gene’s years as a theatre manager occurred in 1933, upon the release of King Kong. The Motion Picture Herald, a publication for exhibitors, sponsored a contest awarding a prize to the exhibitor who could come up with the best stunt to promote the picture. Roth devised a fifty-foot tall cardboard mockup of Kong and had a real girl placed twenty-five feet above the ground in a box hidden behind the ape’s hand, giving the appearance it was clutching her. Gene won first prize.

By the early Forties, though life for Gene was financially stable, he was becoming increasingly distressed. Towards the end of 1942 he was managing a sixteen-hundred seat theatre in Burlington, New Jersey and the pressure was getting to him. Finally, one night after closing the theatre he drove to Philadelphia where his wife was staying with her mother. By the time he arrived he was, in his own words, “Physically a wreck – physically, totally mentally exhausted.” He slept for over twenty-four hours and when he woke up “I ate like a horse.” After three weeks’ recuperation, Roth decided to head to California once more. He had a cousin, Bob Stutenroth, who could get him a job on the graveyard shift at Lockheed Airport. On January 30, 1943, he arrived in Hollywood, where he took up residence at the Mark Twain Hotel on Wilcox and Selma. His wife followed shortly after and later that year their daughter, Dorene, was born.

Not long after Gene began work at Lockheed, he ran into an old acquaintance, Jack Pomeroy, who was now a Hollywood talent agent. They had met when Pomeroy and his wife, Josephine, had had a dance act that toured the dying vaude circuits, which included some of the houses Gene managed. Pomeroy had seen Roth emcee and suggested he try filmwork. Gene readily agreed and his career as a character actor took off like a brushfire. He didn’t remain at Lockheed long.

Between 1943 and 1950, Roth appeared in some eighty-odd films, beginning with his role as Nazi General Diebold in Universal’s The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler, concerning the efforts of a Hitler lookalike to set a trap for the Fuehrer’s death. It was Gene’s first credited film appearance. Until 1949, he continued to bill himself as Gene Stutenroth. That year, at the suggestion of a director, he deGermanized it to Roth. His last appearance as Stutenroth was in a Gene Autry Western, The Big Sombrero. The very same month saw the release of Alaska Patrol, in which he appeared under his new name. From then on, it was Gene Roth or Eugene Roth.

At first, as the final years of World War Two wore on, Gene found himself (given his Aryan looks) playing an inordinate number of Nazis in such films as Song of Russia, Enemy of Women, The Hitler Gang and the first of over twenty serials he was to appear in, Adventures of the Flying Cadets (1943). However, being able to produce not only a German accent, but also Swedish, Russian, French and English cockney, he was soon expanding his image of characterizations. In 1944 alone, Roth appeared in sixteen pictures (sometimes in unbilled roles). In the years to come he was variously seen as a detective, butler, miner, masseur, jailer, convict, boxing referee, sea captain, policeman, farmer and even as a man from the Moon. He played Turks and Spaniards as well.

Roth’s first billed appearance in a ‘horror’ film came in 1946 with RKO’s A Game of Death. He had had a small uncredited bit in 1944’s The Spider Woman, with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes versus the maniacal Gale Sondergaard who uses spiders as murder weapons and he had appeared in two films in 1945 that boasted marginal elements of the fantastic: The Master Key, a thirteen-episode Universal serial about Nazi agents who kidnap a scientist and use his invention, the Orotron machine, to extract gold from the ocean; and Strange Illusion, in which a dream leads a man to the murderer of his father. It is with A Game of Death that Roth’s association with fantasy films can be said to have officially begun.

Based on “The Most Dangerous Game”, a short story by Richard Connell, A Game of Death concerns an ex-Prussian officer named Count Zaroff (Edgar Barrier) who lives on a jungle island with four servants (one of whom is Roth). A big-game hunter who has become bored with hunting animals, he has taken to instigating shipwrecks in order to lure human prey onto his island where he then uses them for sport. Human heads adorn his trophy room. Originally filmed in 1932 under its story title, with Leslie Banks in the Zaroff role, it has been re-made several times since, notably in  1961’s Bloodlust, with the late Wilton Graff.

That same year Gene appeared in a Bowery Boys comedy, Mr. Hex, in which Huntz Hall becomes a great boxer after being hypnotized and played Captain Hammond in another Universal serial, Lost City of the Jungle, in which an evil Lionel Atwill journeys to the mythical city of Pendrang to locate an element of Meteorium 245, the only defense against atomic bombs and, thus, a means to advance his designs for world conquest.

1947 brought three more fantasy serials Roth’s way. The Black Widow concerned the efforts of one Sombra (Carol Forman), the nefarious daughter of an Asian king, to steal the secret of a new atomic rocket engine; Jack Armstrong, with John Hart in the title role, had as its menace a mad scientist (Charles Middleton), who is employing cosmic radioactivity to conquer the world; and, finally, there was Brick Bradford, a fifteen-episode Columbia serial in which Brick (the late Kane Richmond) travels back in Time and also to the Moon, where he encounters a group of evil Lunarians. Roth played Akbar, one of these lunar citizens, his moonman costume consisting of a T-shirt, Bermuda shorts and white tennis-shoes.

The following year Gene, still a Stutenroth, had the minor part of Conductor Carson in the fifteen-episode Superman serial starring Kirk Alyn as the phenomenon from Krypton; then, for the next two years, he was seen primarily in Westerns. In point of fact, Gene became as readily identified with Westerns as he did with fantasy films.

1951 brought him the role for which serial fans remember him best. It was also his first major fantasy role. In Captain Video, a Columbia fifteen-parter, based on a television series popular at the time, Gene played Vultura, dictator of the planet Atoma who, with the aid of a corrupt Earth scientist (George Eldredge) hopes to become King of the Universe. Of course, he is opposed by Captain Video* and is eventually destroyed with

*Portrayed by Judd Holdren, a serial actor who later became an accountant and committed suicide in 1974, aged 59.

his own ray-cannon. Roth’s appearance as Vultura has often been unfavorably compared to Charles Middleton’s Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials of years previous and, indeed, there is no argument that the bullying menace of Gene’s huge frame is easily distanced by the crafty and cruel Middleton features and the absurdly cheap garb Roth was obliged to wear didn’t help matters. Still, Captain Video remains a major treat for Roth fans. Another interesting anecdote about the picture is that the costumes for the robots used by Vultura to defeat his nemesis were the same ones used on a 1935 Gene Autry serial, The Phantom Empire.

Gene also had a prominent villain role in Mysterious Island (1951), another Columbia serial. This one took place in 1865 on a remote island where some castaways battle natives, pirates and a beautiful woman from the planet Mercury (Karen Randle) who is scheming to destroy the Earth with a radioactive explosion.

By 1950, Roth had begun to divide his time between motion pictures and the new vistas of television. As the year progressed, his career would come to focus less on the large screen and more on the tube. Between 1944 and 1954, he averaged fourteen films a year but after 1955 television was the real bread-and-butter, usurping the position held by B films. Gene appeared in episodes of virtually every Hollywood-based tv series. He acted in eighteen segments of The Lone Ranger alone. Other performances were in shows such as Amos n’ Andy, The Stu Erwin Show, Sky King, Highway Patrol, Death Valley Days, Wells Fargo, Wagon Train and so on. In the fantasy genre, he guested on Mystery Theatre, Space Patrol, Science Fiction Theatre, The Man Called X, a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation entitled Out of Jules Verne and, later, episodes of Twilight Zone and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

By the early Fifties, Gene was one of the best known and busiest of character actors; still, he continued to accept unbilled bits and day-player work when the opportunity arose, so that contrary to the habits of many of his contemporaries, he could be seen in substantial roles in B films and yet turn up in a tiny part the very same year. Such was his appearance in 1952’s Red Planet Mars, a story in which Earth makes contact with Mars and finds in existence an ‘advanced’ society ruled by peace-loving Christians. Roth was President of the United Mine Workers back on Earth.

He had another major role, that of Reckov, henceman to the iniquitous Dr. Grood (Michael Fox) in the 1953 serial The Lost Planet, again starring Judd Holdren. Grood is a native of the planet Ergro and has kidnapped a brilliant scientist (Forrest Taylor) whom he intends to use in his plans to, what else, conquer the universe. Robotmen, death rays, invisibility rays and cosmojets are but a few of the fantasy gimmicks on hand.

Roth’s last serial performance was in one of the last serials made, the 1955 release Panther Girl of the Congo, a twelve-part Republic film later edited together with tv showings under the title The Claw Monsters. An unscrupulous chemist develops a means of enlarging crayfish to gigantic proportions and he uses them to scare African natives away from a diamond mine he hopes to loot. His plans are eventually driven askew by the Panther Girl (Phyllis Coates) and big-game hunter Larry Sanders (Myron Healey).

Two years passed before Roth’s last long run of fantasy films. Then, between 1957 and 1963, he appeared in ten! In ’57, he was seen in Zombies of Mora Tau as the sinister chauffeur who delivers Autumn Russell to the home of Marjorie Eaton, whose husband, a sea captain who drowned with his crew after they attempted to steal sacred jewels from a native tribe, is among the living dead, forced to defend the buried treasure for eternity. The same year saw the release of Outer Space Jitters, a Three Stooges short in which Roth was the Grand Zilch, ruler of the planet Zunev to which the Stooges travel. This was one of at least six Stooges shorts Gene played in.

1958 saw the release of two horror films prominently featuring Roth. In She Demons, a seventy-seven minute low-budget venture, he was the strongman-helper of a Nazi war criminal (Rudolph Anders) who, on an isolated island, is conducting experiments on attractive women in an attempt to transfer their beauty onto his hideously-scarred wife. After his operations, of course, his victims are monsters and Roth cruelly keeps them in line.

The Spider (also titled Earth Vs. the Spider) is one of the classic Bert I. Gordon features. Gordon, at that time Roger Corman’s chief competition in the fantasy field, specialized in small-budgeted films that relied on special effects for their novelty. Other of his works in the same vein include The Amazing Colossal Man, The Cyclops, Attack of the Puppet People, War of the Colossal Beast and Village of the Giants. He produced, directed and wrote The Spider and, with his wife, Flora, worked on the special effects.

The story had two teenagers (June Kenney, Gene Persson) coming across a giant fifty-ton spider living in a cave. They notify their fellow townspeople and the spider is captured by being tranquilized with DDT and is then stored in the high school gymnasium. Eventually it awakes and escapes, running amock throughout the city until the school’s science teacher (Ed Kemmer) comes up with a scheme to destroy the beast. Gene, with fourth billing, played the sceptical Sherriff Cagle, who eventually meets his death in the clutches of the monster.

The next year, as Sherriff Kovis, he was involved, with equal scepticism, in a battle with giant leeches in a Florida swamp in Attack of the Giant Leeches, a Roger Corman picture. He worked again for Bert Gordon in 1960’s Tormented, playing a lunch stand operator in their eerie tale of a man (Richard Carlson) who is driven to madness and suicide by the ghost of a woman for whose death he feels responsible.

Roth appeared briefly as Governor of the Animals in George Pal’s Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961), an ambitious fantasy about the legendary land that sank beneath the sea. Its star with Anthony Hall, who later worked under his real name, Sal Ponti, as screenwriter and associate producer of 1973’s Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls.

The following year Gene was the Captain of the Royal Guards in the Three Stooges feature, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, concerning the Stooges’ trip via time machine back to ancient Greece where they encounter not only Hercules (Samson Burke), but Achilles, Ulysses, a two-headed Cyclops (football stars Marlin and the late Mike McKeever) and various other monsters. Then there was a bit as a professor in the lavish Cinerama presentation The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) as well as the role of a tailor in Roger Corman’s remake of Tower of London (1962), a fictionalized story of the infamous Richard III. The dialogue director of the latter film was Francis Ford Coppola. Vincent Price portrayed Richard.

Roth’s last horror film came in 1963 when he enacted a coachman in the “House of the Seven Gables” segment of Twice Told Tales, a United Artists release directed by Sidney Salkow. The movie starred Vincent Price in all three tales, two of which were based on short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Gene’s segment a greatly altered, loosely-adapted condensation of Hawthorne’s famous novel concerning the haunted Pynchon house and its curse.

In 1963, Gene’s life underwent a great upheaval. He was divorced from his wife of twenty-nine years and he almost died when he contracted pernicious anaemia. This form of anaemia is a condition more apt to occur among blue-eyed, fair-haired people. The stomach juice lacks an enzyme needed for absorption of protein meat foods and thus does not provide enough of that substance needed to facilitate the growth of red blood cells. Though he was hospitalized for a mere two weeks, Gene lost over one hundred pounds from his usual 240-250. He once had weighed as much as 263 pounds, not quite as high as it sounds, given Roth’s large-boned physique. For a time, he was not expected to live, but Gene pulled through, quite to the amazement of his doctors. His case, in fact, was referred to afterwards in several medical journals as, at that time, he had the highest white blood cell count of anyone who has survived the effects of this affliction.

Despite his recovery, the illness took its toll. Gene was never able to gain back the lost weight; his gaunt features were a far cry from his former strapping build. He felt his image was ruined, and no doubt this altered his approach to his work. His last billed motion picture credit was in Young Dillinger, a 1965 Allied Artists release with the late Nick Adams in the title role. His last actual motion picture appearance was a bit in Ross Hunter’s 1967 comedy Rosie, starring Rosalind Russell.

In the last ten years of his life, Gene seldom worked. Bits in television trickled in and his last tv appearance came in the early 70s in an episode of the David Janssen series, O’Hara – U.S. Treasury. His last actual work was in “The Cure” episode of the Planet of the Apes tv series, but his part wound up on the cutting-room floor.

After his divorce, Roth had moved from his home in Sun Valley to an apartment in Hollywood. For the activity, he took a part-time job working behind the liquor counter at a drugstore on Hollywood and Highland. He was often recognized and was happy to reminisce about his movie days.

His daughter, Dorene, later said that in the last three years of his life, Gene was closer to resuscitating his career than he had been in the previous ten. True or not, he never got the chance.

On July 19, 1976, while crossing a Los Angeles street with a woman friend, a speeding car bore down on him. Gene pushed the woman out of the path of the vehicle, but he himself was killed, a victim of a hit-and-run. He was seventy-three.