My Favorite Actor

It’s movie trivia time!  What actor appeared in more movies than John Wayne and Cary Grant combined, was in most of Frank Capra’s movies, appeared in The Wizard of Oz, got a gold medal from the Red Cross for entertaining the troops during World War II, and quietly vanished from the public eye in the 1950’s?

No, it was not Marjorie Main, but that’s a great guess, since the woman was in damn near everything.  The correct answer is, “Jimmy the Raven”.  Well…his name might have been, “Jimmy the Crow”, as there is some debate about which species of Corvid he was, but he was definitely Jimmy the Large Black Bird who worked with Jimmy Stuart, Cary Grant, and Katherine Hepburn.

Jimmy, whatever he was, was raised and trained by the famous animal trainer Curly Twiford, who claimed to have found Jimmy in the Mojave Desert, apparently abandoned in the nest.  Twiford raised Jimmy, teaching him more than 50 tricks, such as opening an envelope, bringing objects, lighting a cigarette, using a typewriter, and riding a specially built miniature motorcycle.  According to Twiford, Jimmy was as intelligent as the average 8-year-old human child, and was capable of learning a new trick in less than a week (perhaps a little longer if the verbal command to trigger the trick was two words instead of one).

You can watch Jimmy performing one of those tricks in a wonderful comedy, You Can’t Take it With You (1938), where Jimmy works in the basement and helps make fireworks.  I’d explain that, but it might spoil the movie for you.  Just trust me, it’s a great movie, directed by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, and Jean Arthur.  And, of course, Jimmy the Raven—the real star of the movie.  Alternately, you can watch The Wizard of Oz and watch Jimmy torment the Scarecrow.

Unfortunately, Jimmy didn’t get much credit for the movies he starred in, since in almost all of them his name doesn’t appear in the credits.  The only exception I have found, so far, is the somewhat less than exceptional Johnny Weissmuller neo-Tarzan movie, Jungle Jim, and even there, he appears as Caw-Caw the Crow.

Twiford didn’t particularly care what you called his bird as long as you ponied up the $500 a week fee for Jimmy to be on set with a handler.  If you wanted Twiford to be present, in case the director wanted Jimmy to learn a new trick, that was an extra $200.   Twiford had an incredible stable of animals and supplied everything from bears to meadowlarks to the studio.  According to Curly, Jimmy earned enough money to pay for the room and board of the entire menagerie.

There is a great story that the director of a Ritz Brothers movie wanted 300 cats for one scene.  Even Twiford didn’t have that many cats on hand, so he advertised in the newspapers that he would pay 75 cents for a cat, no questions asked.  Since that was good money for a cat, one enterprising young teenager stole a cat from his neighbor, a policeman, and sold the cat to Twiford.  The policeman figured out what had happened  to his pet and was successful at retrieving his cat.  The teenager, figuring that with hundreds of cats on hand Twiford couldn’t tell them apart, promptly stole the cat again and collected another 75 cents.

Supposedly, after the shooting was complete, an agent from the ASPCA showed up, having received dozens of complaints from people who had lost their cats.  The director, George Marshall, gladly gifted all the cats to the agent, since the studio was paying $120 a day just to feed all the critters.  According to Louella Parsons’ column about the event, it took ten policemen to help transport all the cats to the Humane shelter.

No director hired Jimmy the Raven more frequently than Frank Capra.  Capra rewrote scripts just to include parts for the bird.  In his 1946 classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra cast Jimmy as the pet crow of Uncle Billy, to help indicate that Uncle Billy was eccentric.  In Arsenic and Old Lace, Capra had Jimmy hanging out in the cemetery, to help add a somber tone to the comedy.  Strangely, though Capra used the bird in almost all of his pictures after 1934, the director didn’t mention Jimmy in his autobiography.  

We will probably never know just how many movies Jimmy appeared in.  While I’ve made a list of about three dozen movies in which I’m certain Jimmy is an uncredited star, I’ll admit that it is kind of hard to tell one raven from another.  Hell, it’s damn near impossible to tell a raven from a large crow.  The various people who specialize in collecting data on who starred in which movie estimate that Jimmy starred in more than 600 movies and fewer than a thousand.  

The last movie featuring Jimmy may be Ring Circus (1954).  About a year and a half later, Curly Twiford passed away and his menagerie critters were all sent to new homes.  No one knows what became of Jimmy, who by that time would have been more than twenty years old—fairly old for a raven raised in captivity.  

No animal has ever won an Oscar—the Academy rules expressly prohibit nominations for animals.   That is a shame, since I can think of several animal roles that have been portrayed more brilliantly than those of some of the recent winners.  Maybe it is time for a few Lifetime Achievement Awards for a few worthy animals.  Asta in the Thin Man movies, Pyewacket from Bell, Book, and Candle, Lassie, Cheetah, and Tony the Wonder Horse should all receive awards.  And—if for nothing else than the incredible number of movies he appeared in—Jimmy the Raven should definitely get an Oscar.