Jack Gardner on AllMovie

One of the busiest supporting players in the 1930s and early '40s, wiry general purpose actor Jack Gardner popped up in such disparate films as The Devil's Squadron (1936), Sinners in Paradise (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He played a reporter in all three and that profession would become his on-screen stock-in-trade. Whenever a gaggle of inquisitive newspapermen gathered in a film to attack someone with a barrage of questions, chances were good that Jack Gardner and Lynton Brent were among them. Gardner also played his fair share of messenger boys, receptionists, mechanics, and henchmen. He was a wily Japanese spy in the 1943 Universal serial Adventures of Smilin' Jack (1943). Not to be confused with a silent screen actor (1873-1950) and a vaudevillian (1876-1929) of the same name, this Jack Gardner seems to have left films in the mid-'40s.