Chris Olsen – The Boy Who Cried

In assuming the voice of one-time child actor Chris Olsen, this film examines the vagaries of stardom, the limited agency of the child actor and the continuing legacy of a figure who is a relative footnote in Hollywood history. Although Olsen’s Hollywood career was over by the time he turned
11, he appeared in a number of iconic works of 1950s cinema: Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Douglas Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels (1957), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Budd Boetticher’s The Tall T (1957) and Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956). Drawing together some of the threads that marked Olsen’s relatively brief career, Rappaport’s illuminating essay pinpoints the captivating ordinariness of Olsen’s onscreen persona.