Henry Richard "Huntz" Hall (August 15, 1920[1] – January 30, 1999) was an American radio, stage, and movie performer who appeared in the popular "Dead End Kids" movies, including Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and in the later "Bowery Boys" movies, during the late 1930s to the late 1950s.
Life and career
Hall was born in 1920 in New York City[3] to Joseph Patrick Hall, an engineer from Ireland, and his wife, Mary Ellen (née Mullen) Hall.[1] The fourteenth of sixteen children, he was nicknamed "Huntz" because of his ostensibly Teutonic nose.[4][5] He attended Catholic schools[6] and started performing on radio at five years of age.[7]
He appeared on Broadway in the 1935 production of Dead End, a play written and directed by Sidney Kingsley.[8][9] Hall was then cast along with the other Dead End Kids in the 1937 film Dead End, directed by William Wyler and starring Humphrey Bogart.[10]
Hall served in the United States Army during World War II. In 1943, he appeared in the USN training film "Don't Kill Your Friends" as moronic Ensign Dilbert the Pilot, who carelessly causes the death of a civilian and three servicemen.
Dilbert: Don't Kill Your Friends, 1943
In 1948, Hall was arrested for possession of marijuana. His trial, held in 1949, resulted in a hung jury.[11]
Hall later played the increasingly buffoonish Horace DeBussy "Sach" Jones in 48 of "The Bowery Boys" films, gaining top billing when his longtime partner, Leo Gorcey, left the series in 1956. Hall and Gorcey reunited in Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar (1966) and The Phynx (1969).
He was one of the celebrities featured on the cover of The Beatles' 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In 1971, he co-starred with Art Metrano and Jamie Farr in the CBS situation comedyThe Chicago Teddy Bears. His plans to produce a movie series, "The Ghetto Boys" (a take on the "Bowery Boys"), fell through. In 1973, Hall took part in Princess Grace of Monaco's Council for Drug Abuse, part of the Catholic Office of Drug Education.[12]
^ abcLeonard Getz in his 2006 book From Broadway to the Bowery published by McFarland & Company uses August 15, but the more authoritative Social Security Death Index uses August 18, 1920. The Independent uses August 15, 1919, and the New York Times lists his age as 78, which would make his birth year 1920. Walker and Roat's biography uses 1919. As was the case with many actors, their resumes often conflict with official documents submitted to the government.
