By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: actor and screenwriter Leo V. Gordon, who penned The Wasp Woman, Tobruk and You Can’t Win ‘Em All.
Writers, for the most part, are a cerebral bunch. They live in their own heads, create entire worlds of their own volition, and spend much of their creative time in front of a keyboard or, back in the day, a typewriter. Writers are not, for the most part, tough guys, or tough gals…not really. Even those scribes that write tough, muscular fiction for the page or screen are not usually actually tough themselves. Even those celebrated for being tough tend to be something else altogether; after all, being drunk (Charles Bukowski, Jim Thompson), eccentric (James Ellroy), outspoken (Norman Mailer), iconoclastic (John Milius) or adventurous (Ernest Hemingway) is different from being tough. The likes of Cormac McCarthy and Quentin Tarantino, meanwhile, might write the most violent, ingenious, inventively tough and truly wonderful fiction, but they are, essentially, an intellectual and a video store clerk, respectively. Not tough guys…not really.
None of the aforementioned is designed or intended to diminish the amazing, groundbreaking work done by all of the above-noted writers – we know that you don’t have to be tough to write tough. But when a tough-writing author is actually real-tough into the bargain (like, say, No Beast So Fierce author Eddie Bunker), that makes them even more fascinating. And that’s where under-celebrated actor, novelist and screenwriter Leo Gordon comes in. “Leo Gordon was the scariest man I have ever met,” revered director Don Siegel said of this singularly imposing and relatively unknown figure, who is in desperate need of serious lionisation. Let us begin…
Leo Vincent Gordon was born in Brooklyn on December 2, 1922, which meant that his childhood was defined by the extremes of The Great Depression. Raised in grinding poverty, Gordon only made it to the eighth grade in high school, and left to work in construction and demolition. When America entered WW2 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Gordon enlisted in The US Army and fought with distinction for two years before being awarded an honourable discharge. Always wild, Gordon took it right to the edge when he returned to California after the war. Along with an accomplice, he attempted to rob a bar and its patrons, but ended up getting shot by the cops in the process, which landed him in San Quentin Prison for five years. A noted troublemaker, Gordon was also a proponent of self-improvement, and has spoken of reading nearly every book in the prison library in an effort to better himself.
After his release from prison, Gordon made the most of the benefits accorded him as part of The G.I. Bill (which benefitted returned servicemen from WW2) and began taking acting lessons at The American Academy Of Dramatic Arts. Alongside the likes of Grace Kelly and Ann Bancroft, Gordon was instructed by the great Jason Robards, and eventually found work on the stage. A foreboding acting presence, Gordon caught the attention of a Hollywood agent in a Los Angeles production of the play Darkness At Noon, and made his screen debut in 1951 on the TV series Hands Of Mystery. Tall, imposing and intense, Leo Gordon’s looming physicality quickly saw him tapped to play a long list of bruisers and hard-men. “I look like a heavy,” Gordon once said. “I’m 6’2”, 200 pounds. Got a craggy-ass face.”
Leo Gordon played bad guys to precision, utilising his icy, pale-blue eyes to chilling effect, and really inhabiting his nasty characters with grim efficiency. He appeared in a long list of TV shows, and big screen crime flicks (including Don Siegel’s masterful 1954 prison flick Riot In Cell Block 11, in which he was unforgettable as the appropriately monikered Crazy Mike Carnie) and westerns, even getting killed by John Wayne in 1953’s Hondo. “In the scene where John Wayne kills me down by the stream, I reach for my gun and he shoots me,” Gordon recounted of the experience. “I buckled up and pitched forward. Wayne hollered, ‘Cut! Cut!’, even though John Farrow was directing. Wayne says to me, ‘What was that? When you get hit in the gut with a slug, you go flying backwards.’ I pulled up my shirt to show him where I’d really been shot in the gut. ‘Yeah? I got hit point blank and I went forward.’”
Years before it was commonplace for actors to dabble in other interests like writing and directing, Leo V. Gordon (his official writer’s handle) broke new ground by penning episodes of TV series like Cheyenne and State Trooper before making the move to features with the 1957 western programmer Black Patch. With a knack for writing fast, snappy, catchy scripts, Gordon became a go-to man for producers of low budget exploitation flicks, and penned or co-penned a considerable collection of lurid genre flicks across the horror, thriller, and western spectrum, with titles like 1958’s The Cry Baby Killer (a Roger Corman production starring a very young Jack Nicholson) and Hot Car Girl, 1959’s The Wasp Woman and Attack Of The Giant Leeches, 1961’s The Cat Burglar, 1962’s Tower Of Evil, 1963’s The Terror, and many more.
In amongst all of this lurid, low-budget, highly effective exploitation, there was a handful of reputable studio projects too, with Gordon penning the solid 1965 western The Bounty Killer; the enjoyable 1967 WW2 actioner Tobruk (starring a very stoic Rock Hudson and, even more interestingly, George Peppard as a German Jew serving with the British Army); and the rollicking 1970 adventure You Can’t Win ‘Em All, starring the unlikely team of Tony Curtis and Charles Bronson. A true tough guy of the written word, Leo Gordon passed away in 2000 from heart failure at the age of 78, leaving behind a large and cruelly under-celebrated body of work redolent with pulpy flair and driven by hard-edged action.
Married to actress Lynn Cartwright from 1950 right up until his passing (the couple’s daughter, Tara Gordon, hosts a very cool Facebook page dedicated to her father – “Tough guy with a heart of gold”), Leo V. Gordon sadly never believed that he was truly accepted as a writer, despite the wealth of great material with his name on it. “Writing is more rewarding than acting, but look at my face,” Gordon once said. “Nobody believes I’m a writer. I should be 5’8”, 142 pounds, wear patches on my elbows and horn-rimmed glasses and smoke a pipe. That’s a writer!” Well, damn it, Leo V. Gordon is a writer too…and a damn fine one at that…
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