AllMovie

American actor Robert Burton had the haunted eyes and funereal manner of a city coroner. As such, his film roles were confined to such stock parts as the crooked politician, the unfeeling physician, the self-absorbed scientist, the crooked attorney, the weakling politician, the hidden killer, or the surly fellow whom the heroine shouldn't have married. Burton's movies seldom made the "classic" category; while he appeared in several "A" films like The Big Heat (1953), Compulsion (1959) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) (appearing in the latter as the convention chairman in the climactic assassination sequence), most of his movies were along the lines of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) and Invasion of the Animal People (1962) (for which he was top-billed). Robert Burton was also a frequent TV guest star, though his credits should not be confused with those of soap-opera regular Robert "Skip" Burton.