Not long ago at some ungodly hour of the morning I saw an early Charles Bronson movie (“Showdown at Boot Hill”) in which the tough-guy actor played a bounty hunter driven by the fact that he was very short. Bronson (Luke Welch) spends some time explaining to his love interest that his entire life, including his decision to strap on a gun, has been a response to the humiliations visited on him because of his diminutive stature. Synopses of the movie on the Internet either do not mention this prominent aspect of the plot or touch on it only in passing, perhaps because it seems so much at odds with the figure Bronson cut (often semi-naked) in a series of famous movies — “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Great Escape,” “Hard Times,” “Chato’s Land,” “Mr. Majestyk” and, of course, in what sometimes seemed to be a series of innumerable and increasingly violent “Death Wish” movies.

Bronson is by no means the only action star whose larger than life screen persona was or is at odds with his “real-life” statistics. (Just what those statistics are is often debated on Web sites where there may be a three-inch variation in the height assigned to a particular actor.) The pattern was set in the 1930s and ’40s by Edward G. Robinson (“Little Caesar”), James Cagney, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni — all small men who usually played tough and cruel. Sometimes camera angles obscured the physical facts —

Robinson looked absolutely huge as Wolf Larsen in “The Sea Wolf” in what can be called, without irony, a towering performance — and sometimes the camera just didn’t care as when, for example, Cagney regularly beat up men obviously twice his size.

Slightly later came John Garfield, and the smallest of them all, Alan Ladd who played big in “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Glass Key,” “The Badlanders” and who more than holds his own against Ben Johnson and a tree-like Van Heflin in “Shane.” (This is slightly more plausible than a slender Montgomery Clift trading blows in “Red River” with John Wayne who, it must be said, had just been shot by John Ireland.)

Famously slight Paul Newman displayed his chest and pugilistic abilities in movies like “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” “Hud,” “The Long, Hot Summer” and “Cool Hand Luke.” James Dean would have made the list had he lived longer. Now aging tough guy-short guys (by short I mean under 5-foot-9) include Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Mel Gibson, Jean Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, who created not one but two iconic American males, Rocky and Rambo.

And these days we have a bumper crop of undersized super heroes — Tom Cruise, Tobey Maguire, Mark Wahlberg and Robert Downey Jr., along with the occasionally macho Johnny Depp and Sean Penn.

So what? Who cares? Well, I care because I used to be 5-foot-8 and now am something less. (I don’t know how much less because when I’m measured at the doctor’s office I close my eyes.) And so I’m always on the lookout for celluloid he-men no taller than I am. When I find a new one I run home to my wife and ask, “How tall do you think Mel Gibson is?” or “Who do you think is taller, Sylvester Stallone or me?” (I know it should be “I.”)

The other question I delight in asking my wife is, “Did you know that (fill in the blank) is Jewish?” This is part of my effort to convince her that she is the only non-Jew in the world. Recently I have made progress in this aim by bringing home names like Kate Hudson, Helena Bonham Carter, John Houseman, Hedy Lamarr, Laurence Harvey, Daniel Radcliffe, Jennifer Connelly, Ginnifer Goodwin, Douglas Fairbanks, Harrison Ford, Bronco Billy Anderson, Mae West, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Minnie Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Leslie Howard — yes, Scarlett O’Hara’s Ashley — and my personal favorite, another Ashley, the late, great anthropologist Ashley Montagu, nee Israel Ehrenberg. (Some of these are disputed because the father, not the mother, is Jewish.)

The psychology that links my two obsessions is rather obvious. Small men feel (as does Bronson’s character in “Showdown at Boot Hill” ) that the world belongs to big men. Seeing men you know to be small playing big on the silver screen is comforting, even though the comfort depends on a very suspect transference. Jews — at least Jews of my generation — feel that the world is always ready to blame them for its ills and that at any moment the virulent anti-Semitism that flowered in the Third Reich could erupt again. Discovering that Jews already rule some worlds and wield influence far out of proportion to their numbers is again comforting, although the comfort is somewhat diminished by the realization that it is just this over-prominence that often fuels anti-Semitism. But you take your comfort where you can get it, and for me, comfort at the highest level would be identifying with a short, tough guy who is also Jewish. That means Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, James Caan (perhaps a bit too tall ) and maybe Robert Downey Jr. (the Jewish father thing again). A small list, but in times of need, big enough.

Note: Ginnifer Goodwin’s name was misspelled in an early version of this column.