Uncommon vintage 8x10-inch black and white portrait, boldly signed and inscribed for an inveterate New York City-based in-person collector in the 1930s. In good condition, with some gentle edge wear. Musclebound Olympian wrestler Nat Pendelton, who landed a silver medal at the 1920 games in Belgium, was called upon throughout silent and early talkie eras to play mentally limited strongmen, thugs, gangsters, gumshoes, and officers of the law.  Best known for playing Eugen Sandow in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), he was also memorable as Smoke in The Sea Wolf (1930); Abe Gorman in The Beast of the City (1932); Corporal Cessano in The White Sister (1933); Strozzi in Harold Lloyd's The Cat's-Paw (1933); the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers (1932), as one of the two college football players who kidnap Harpo and Chico, and At the Circus (1939), as the weightlifter Goliath; Sergeant Heath in The Garden Murder Case (1933); Rocky O'Neil in the sci-fi B-picture Trapped by Television (1933); "Dice" Loderhouse Shaughnessy in The Shopworn Angel (1938); Lieutenant John Guild in Another Thin Man (1939); Mr. Grimes in On Borrowed Time (1939); Roscoe in The Ghost Comes Home (1940); Sargent Collins in the Abbott and Costello classic Buck Privates (1941); Red Hogan in the Lionel Atwill horror gem The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942); the Bela Lugosi thriller Scared to Death (1947); and ambulance driver Joe Wayman in a long string of Dr. Kildare flicks of the 1930s and 1940s.

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