Fritz Feld

Pop, Snap, Crackle

Over a lengthy career in which he played butlers, hotel managers, and other haughty men with power in their own domain, Fritz Feld eventually worked out a signature move; he would open his mouth, hit it with the palm of his hand, and make a popping noise like a champagne bottle being opened, and Feld even signed autographs with the word “Pop” next to his name. “If you’re a leading man and you appear in 15 scenes in a film, you may play one scene weak and do the next one better,” Feld told the LA Times in 1985. “I’ve got to be right on the nose with just one appearance or two. You want people to say, ‘I’d like to see more of him.’ ”

Born in Germany in 1900, Feld went on the stage as a teenager and played a jester on screen in The Golem (1920) before assisting theater impresario Max Reinhardt and traveling to America with him in 1923 to perform in The Miracle. Feld decided to stay in the states and got a small role as a bearded Russian revolutionary in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928), but it was only in the late 1930s that he started appearing regularly in movies.

He slicked back his curly hair and wore a monocle for his best part in Howard Hawks’s classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938), in which Feld plays psychiatrist Dr. Lehman, a man who explains to madcap heiress Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) that “all people who behave strangely… are not insane” before twitching his eyes like a madman. This tic-ridden doctor also helpfully explains to Susan that “the love impulse in man very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict,” which sets her imagination whirring. Dr. Lehman has an attractive young wife (Tala Birell) who also has a slight accent; was she once one of his patients?

In a farcical coincidence later in the film, Susan and David Huxley (Cary Grant) find themselves singing outside the window of the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lehman in Connecticut, and Feld’s Lehman takes Susan to jail and tries to unravel the plot, and outside the jail it also turns out that Lehman testified in a case for the all-important Mr. Peabody (George Irving). If we think about it a bit, Dr. Lehman is likely something of a crank, but he does state the theme of the film and set it in motion.

Feld made scads of pictures after that, generally as hyper-active hotel managers, and he married a younger actress named Virginia Christine in 1940 (director Ernst Lubitsch was their best man). He appeared as a tour guide on I Love Lucy in the 1950s and regularly enlivened the comedies of Jerry Lewis in the 1960s and then Mel Brooks films later on, and Feld also ran a community theater in Brentwood.

At the age of 87 Feld made an impression in a short dramatic part as a bum in Barfly (1987), in which he lit Faye Dunaway’s cigarette and then clicked his heels for her, a remembrance of whatever his character’s former life had been. Feld died at age 93, his ever-spry and enthusiastic presence having dotted its way through hundreds of films, and always I would like to see more of him.