If you’re an actor that only has one film to your credit on the imdb – even though it was an uncredited role – you can’t really do much better to have it be in a Laurel & Hardy film. In their 1945 film The Bullfighters, my personal favorite of the boys’ later films, they visit a bull farm to look for a bull for Stan to battle, hoping for a ‘blind and contented’ one to fit the bill. The man who runs the farm has a boy named Pancho, who admits he is afraid of the bulls, despite the efforts of Richard K. Muldoon, who is trying to fill Stan with confidence that he will be safe in the ring. Pancho then inexplicably fires off slingshot that knocks off Stan and Ollie’s hats.
Ralph Platz is the boy who played Pancho, and years later – 69 to be exact – he was invited and came to the Laurel and Hardywood Sons of the Desert convention in Hollywood. As he told the story, his mother Mae Giraci was a silent film actress who was discovered by Cecil B. DeMille. She later signed him up with the Screen Actors Guild hoping that he might follow in her footsteps. He was in fact occasionally called upon when a Mexican boy was needed as an extra or stand-in.
When The Bullfighters was being filmed, he was picked from a casting directory and fit the bill perfectly as young Pancho. Although his only lines are “Si, Señor” and “No, Señor” he delivered them both in such a funny way that long before I ever met him, I would often quote his lines with the same intonation.
Who knew that roughly 30 years after I first saw The Bullfighters, I’d be standing next to Pancho, that little Mexican boy, now a handsome and very nice man? I was very happy to meet him when he was a guest at the Egyptian Theatre during the convention’s first night of screenings on July 2, 2014.
Was I happy about it? Si, Señor. Did I ever think I’d get the chance? No, Señor
Celebrities of the Laurel & Hardywood convention will continue at the Hollywood Museum…
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