Leo Gordon

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Leo Gordon (b. December 2, 1922 - d. December 26, 2000) was an American movie and television actor and screenplay writer noted for his size and apparent strength. He'd served time for armed robbery in San Quentin, and when he returned there to shoot Riot in Cell Block 11, the guards were wary of him since they remembered him vividly as one of their toughest inmates. The film's director, Don Siegel, said Gordon was the "scariest man I ever met." Gordon also played a highly charged Dillinger in Siegel's Baby Face Nelson, with Mickey Rooney as the crazed protagonist. Gordon is probably most noted for his recurring character "Big Mike McComb" on the Maverick television series from 1957 to 1960, working alongside James Garner and Jack Kelly. Garner recalled in his videotaped interview for the Archive of American Television that Gordon purposely punched him for real in one of their first scenes together and that Garner hit him back when filming the next scene.

In a spoof of High Noon, Gordon played an ex-convict who wants revenge against Andy Taylor in the episode "High Noon in Mayberry" on The Andy Griffith Show. Perhaps Gordon's single most memorable scene occurred in McLintock! (1963), during which John Wayne knocks him down a long mudslide ("I won't! I won't! The hell I won't").

Gordon also wrote scripts for television episodes and movies that were filmed, sometimes writing himself a good role. Occasionally, Gordon appeared as an uneducated bodyguard on Garner's series The Rockford Files in the 1970s. Altogether, Gordon made over 160 appearances as an actor in movies and television shows beginning in 1952 (frequently billed as "Leo V. Gordon") and wrote twenty scripts that became movies or television episodes, most notably the feature films You Can't Win 'Em All (1970) starring Tony Curtis and Charles Bronson and Tobruk (1967) starring Rock Hudson and George Peppard and directed by Arthur Hiller.