Movie history is littered with Igors, and while most of them aren't exactly gifted conversationalists, they're usually at least gabby enough to croak out a "Yes mah-stah!" when appropriate. Not so for Charles Buchinsky (later Bronson) and his unusually reticent Igor in Andre De Toth's 3-D horror flick "House of Wax." Bronson’s Igor first appears after Vincent Price's character Professor Jarrod's first museum has been burnt to the ground with Jarrod inside. When Jarrod reemerges, his hands have been too badly burned to be useful as a sculptor, so he employs Bronson's Igor to create his wax figures for him. Oddly, Igor will only sculpt likenesses of himself -- "He has a strange obsession, this mute of mine," notes Jarrod.

It's not entirely clear how Jarrod hooked up with Igor, or why such a notorious perfectionist would employ a deaf mute who can only sculpt his own face, but hiring such a rough and tumble brute certainly pays off when people start to catch wind of his plan to murder his enemies and turn them into permanent members of his collection. Igor catches a guy nosing around in the House of Wax after hours and beats the hell out of him. He chokes him until he loses consciousness, but then he makes a mistake. Instead of just continuing to choke the dude until he's dead, he gets too fancy for his own good and decides to decapitate the fellow in a guillotine displayed in the wax museum. By the time he's cleared a few wax dummies and gotten his victim into place, the police have stormed in and saved the day. Normally the dumb part of the "deaf and dumb" thing is just an ignorant insult, but in Igor's case, it's kind of true.

Has any character since the dawn of sound film appeared in more movies and said less than Silent Bob? The larger, quieter half of Kevin Smith's non-dynamic duo appeared in six of the director's films, and also popped up in cameos in Wes Craven's "Scream 3" and Kyle Newman's "Fanboys.” Over 15 years, Silent Bob's appearances have codified into a recognizable pattern: the character stands by wordlessly for most of the movie while his drug dealer partner Jay (Jason Mewes) spouts one profanity after another, until the narrative presents him an opportunity to chime in with a single bit of practical advice. And the character hasn't simply endured; he's proved surprisingly malleable. In "Clerks," Smith affects a believably low-life-ian scowl, but by "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," he's mugging and gesticulating like a well-trained mime. He's proven adaptable to just about any style of film Smith can write: in "Mallrats," he's an engineering genius with a cartoonish, Batman-style utility belt; in the next movie, "Chasing Amy," he delivers a surprisingly mature monologue about the pitfalls of male insecurity. Each View Askew movie announced where Jay and Bob would pop up next, but the last one, 2006's "Clerks II," warned that "for now, they're taking it easy." Given how durable the characters have been thus far, a return seems inevitable, if not imminent.

For a lot of "Planet of the Apes," Charlton Heston plays his own silent sidekick; a stray bullet to the throat renders him conveniently speechless for a hefty chunk of the movie. When Heston's character, an astronaut named Taylor, regains his voice, he says he volunteered for the mission that lands him smack dab in the middle of all the damn dirty apes because there was nothing he cared about back on the Earth. "Oh, there were women," he boasts. "Lots of women! Lots of lovemaking, but no love." That all changes when he meets the primitive mute female he names Nova (Linda Harrison). Theirs is a passion both tender and chauvinistic; when you compare Taylor's reminiscence about his booty-laden past and his contentment in Nova's arms, what you're left with is the suggestion that all he was ever looking for was a woman who wouldn't talk back. If Nova could, I doubt she'd let him slide when he spouts positively dickish remarks like "You're not as smart as Stewart [the deceased female member of Taylor's crew] but you're the only girl in town." It's admirable that Taylor refuses to leave Nova behind when he escapes captivity, but I get the distinct impression he's only keeping her around because she looks good in a loincloth and knows how to keep her mouth shut. Sadly, you could argue that Harrison's only in the movie for the exact same reason.

I don't know if I can adequately describe the anti-ambrosia of discomfiture and confusion that I felt as a child whenever Pepe Le Pew appeared as part of the Looney Tunes programming I took in on a daily basis. Watching them today, I can't say that much has changed: Pepe, an incorrigible, over-sexed French skunk who says things like "the game of love is never called on account of darkness" is constantly chasing, stalking and otherwise molesting Kitty, the black cat who somehow ends up with a big white stripe down her back at the beginning of every episode. Kitty seems to have no voice (though she does sometimes let fly the occasional "le pant" or "le mew") and no recourse but to run as fast and far as she can from Pepe's frankly terrifying advances. "All you need is a lee-ttle occupational ther-ah-pee," he calls after her, "lahh-k mah-king loooove." Kitty takes us to the more disturbing end of the silent sidekick spectrum, where silence is not arch refusal or straight-man strategy but rather connotes a kind of abject sexual powerlessness, a terrorized inability rather than a choice. I still get the creepy childhood fantods watching these.

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EricC

Harpo was never a sidekick, he was always a full member of the team, and always as important a part of the plot as his younger brother Groucho, and generally more important than his older brother Chico. The idea that he was anything close to being a sidekick is ... well ... I would expect this from some anonymous blog, but for an article on IFC ... it's borderline embarrassing.

Alison Willmore

I'd say we used "sidekick" pretty loosely here -- obviously, Penn and Teller are a duo, and to consider one the more ascendant is arbitrary; Teller, and, for that matter, Harpo are sidekicks more in the sense that the nonverbal member of any pair or group never obviously stands in the center of the spotlight.