fall guy

Fall guy is a colloquial phrase that refers to a person to whom blame is deliberately and falsely attributed in order to deflect blame from another party. Origin The origin of the term "fall guy" is unknown and contentious. Many sources place it in the early 20th century, while some claim an earlier origin. In April 2007, William Safire promoted a search to unearth its origins. The term "fall guy" for one whom blame was directed upon in order to shield others had appeared in mass public culture in the U.S. at least by the 1920s. In 1925 it was the title of a Broadway play, The Fall Guy, by James Gleason and George Abbott, starring future Hollywood character actors Ernest Truex and Dorothy Patterson.{{efn|The play opened at the Eltinge 42nd Street Theater in New York City, New York, USA on 10 March 1925 and ran for 95 performances, closing in June 1925. The opening night cast included Ernest Truex as Johnnie Quinlan and Dorothy Peterson as Lottie Quinlan.<ref name=IMdB>" IMdB, The Fall Guy (1930)</ref>}} This was turned into a crime film by Hollywood in 1930, The Fall Guy, with the "fall guy" again used by a gangster as an unwitting narcotics courier. It saw widespread use in the crime-dominated film noir era of the mid-to-late 1940s into the early 1950s. A related use of "fall guy" was for one to be left "holding the bag", meaning to be abandoned to be caught and implicated in a crime, particularly holding stolen goods, either by design or circumstance. This in turn led to the term bagholder, the victim of a fraudulent investment scheme. A related term was "patsy", which typically (but not exclusively) referred to someone set up before the fact to take a fall, as opposed to simply being left "holding the bag" when something went wrong in carrying out a crime.