Notes

Tod Browning directs the cast of FREAKS.  Angelo Rossito stands in the foreground.

Alright, so his connection to pop music was tenuous at best, but let us pause a moment to honor Angelo Rossitto nonetheless.

As Craven types this on March 13, 2007, we are in our 5,653th day without little Angie in the world, and it is still a poorer place for his loss.  Best-known for his countless roles in motion pictures and on television during a career that lasted more than six decades, Rossitto also appeared in music videos and on at least two classic album covers.

That’s Angie standing duded up next to Tom Waits on the cover of 1983’s SWORDFISHTROMBONES.  This album is considered one of Waits’ best and represents the singer-songwriter’s initial foray into the cacophonous, Partchian territory he has occupied during the latter half of his career.  (The photo was taken by German-born photographer and artist Michael Russ, who established his reputation shooting erotica for PLAYBOY and who also directed Rossitto as one of various oddballs parading through the video for the album’s “In the Neighborhood.”) 

And 12 years earlier, Angelo appeared as one of several strange characters on the wrap-around cover of THE BASEMENT TAPES, the classic collaboration between Bob Dylan and the Band.  On this album, Rossitto is depicted as a news vendor, which was a natural role for the actor, since hawking papers on the corner of Hollywood and Vine was precisely how Angie supplemented his acting income for decades.  On both this and the cover for SWORDFISHTROMBONES, Rossitto embodies the weird, the outcast and the survivor – and indeed, these were the hallmark qualities of his many roles… and of the man himself.

Rossitto made his cinematic debut in the 1920s, in silent films opposite the likes of John Barrymore and Anna May Wong, but it was Tod Browning’s unforgettable 1932 geekfest FREAKS that made him the go-to guy when filmmakers needed an ominous little person.  Whether trying to off the Great Detective as a pygmy named Obongo in SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SPIDER WOMAN (1944), or stealing the hearts of audiences as the diminutive Master in MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985), Rossitto was always memorable in roles that were frequently as tiny in screen-time as he was in stature.  He never failed to make an impression, even when he was unrecognizably costumed, as, for instance, when he donned one of designer Paul Blaisdell’s stunning (and top-heavy!) masks to portray a titular little green man in the A.I.P. sci-fi comedy, INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN (or, for that matter, when he enacted Seymour the Spider and Klang in the 1970s kids’ show, H.R. PUFNSTUF).

His resume includes timeless classics (like Max Reinhardt’s astonishing Shakespearean adaptation of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM in 1935, Preston Sturges’ 1947 screwball extravaganza THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK and Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s musical tragedy CAROUSEL in 1956) as well as some of the most enjoyable stinky milestones in schlockdom (appearing with the East Side Kids in 1941’s SPOOKS RUN WILD, as a newsboy in the expressionistic shocker DEMENTIA in 1955, and meeting a particularly grisly fate in 1971 as a demented carnival barker in Craven’s favorite bad movie, Al Adamson’s gloriously incoherent DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN).  And he endeared himself to a new generation of fans during the 1970s in his recurring role as Little Moe the shoeshine boy on BARETTA.

For these and many other reasons, we salute Angelo Rossitto, a short man who cast a long, long shadow.