With these early critical and box-office winners, Ratoff was in constant demand as a character actor throughout the 1930s, many in B-pictures but increasingly with young directors who later had important careers. Because of his large, shambling frame and uncertain command of English, he was often typecast as a villain in an American setting or an 'authentic' foreigner in the dozens of 1930s films that recreated a glamorous fictional Europe on the Hollywood backlot. In Frank Lloyd's "Under Two Flags" (1936), he was in the French Foreign Legion; in Howard Hawks' "The Road to Glory" (1936), a Russian sergeant in World War 1 France. His role as a comic showbiz caricature was also popular, especially in pre-Code backstage musicals, most famously as Mae West's lawyer in "I'm No Angel" (1933).