Apart from John Farrow's "Wake Island" (1942), Joseph Losey's "The Lawless" (1950) and "The Damned" (1962) and Howard Hawks's "El Dorado" (1967), Carey appeared in largely routine film fare, but Alfred Hitchcock's superb "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943), with its portrait of a small-town American family, would prove prophetic for Carey's work from the 1950s on. Keeping busy in TV as his film career waned, the durable actor showed himself to be ideal for the small screen, embodying sensible family men (typically doctors and lawyers), most memorably as Dr. Tom Horton, a centerpiece of the long-running daytime drama, "Days of Our Lives", from 1965 until immediately before his death in 1994.