Memories of Fred MacMurray: article and video

Fred MacMurray is one of the most successful American film actors of the 20th century. From 1935 until 1973 he was the star, or one of the stars, of more than 80 films. Along with his amazing career longevity Fred proved to be very versatile, working successfully in different genres. In addition to his comedic skills, he was also one of the great romantic leads of his day. Considered by some to be a lightweight, the truth is that even when he played opposite the likes of Colbert, Lombard, Hepburn, Stanwyck, Dunne, Arthur, and Crawford, he was never overshadowed.

Because his screen persona is multi-faceted, he is hard to define as an actor. Warm, down-to-earth and comforting to be around, he could also be the consummate cad. Always taken for granted, the critics didn’t champion him, and he never received a major industry award. Only by looking back on the whole of his long and amazing career can we begin to see and understand his remarkable achievement.

Fred MacMurray was born in Kankakee, Illinois, on August 30, 1908. He was the son of concert violinist Frederick MacMurray, and Maleta Martin, the most popular girl in small Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. His parents’ marriage didn’t survive the backbreaking concert schedule that his father, Frederick, undertook to support the family. Fred was an all-American boy. He excelled at sports. His height made him a natural for basketball, and he also was a key player on the Beaver Dam High School football team. In all, Fred would win ten letters for athletics in high school, and a scholarship to Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin to play football. (It is fondly remembered in Beaver Dam, even today, how Fred kicked a 45-yard field goal to win a football game against arch-rival Portage.)

Fred was influenced from an early age by music. Before his father left the family, and ultimately Fred’s life, young Fred had made his stage debut playing violin opposite his father. It was an experience which terrified Fred, (“I trembled and I shook”) and he developed stage fright from the experience. He also found that, unlike his father, he didn’t take to the violin, but enjoyed piano, guitar, and especially the saxophone which he played in the high school band. In the summers, when Fred wasn’t working part time for the Malleable Iron Range Company, or canning peas at the local Beaver Dam cannery, he was playing in a band with his high school buddy Myron Bartell. Fred later recalled that the two spent the summers of 1923 and 1924 playing at a “gin joint” on the shores of Beaver Dam Lake. Bartell would play piano and Fred would be on his saxophone and together they would play outside the front door to attract customers. After graduation from high school, Fred began his short-lived career at Carroll College. Even though he received a scholarship, it paid only for tuition and books, and nothing else. To earn extra money Fred took a job playing sax with a six-piece band called Tom Joy’s Gloom Chasers. The band ended up playing five nights per week at the Blue Mounds Inn, and Fred wouldn’t get home until it was nearly five a.m. “I didn’t have to tell them I couldn’t do jazz bands and football and classes—they told me,” Fred later declared.

After leaving Carroll College, Fred went to Chicago, where he planned to study art at the Chicago Art Institute. An aunt allowed him to sleep on a sofa at her home while he attended school. He spent his days looking for a job and nights taking classes. He found that he didn’t really enjoy his job working as a salesman at the Marshall Fields department store and that his true love was still music. He soon ditched his gig at Marshall Fields and joined a band called The Royal Purples, which played out of Loyola University. Fred played several months worth of dates around the Chicagoland area, but without getting anywhere as a musician. When his mother decided to visit his grandmother, who had moved to California, Fred offered to drive her there, and give the Golden State a try. Fred and his mother settled in Southern California and lived for a time with Fred’s grandmother. He got a job in a pit orchestra in a Los Angeles theater and, meanwhile, was encouraged by several people to take a stab at acting. He registered with central casting and got occasional work as a film extra. Despite his tall (now 6’ 3”) good looks and wavy dark hair, his natural shyness did him in. On one picture, a director noticed him and asked if he would be willing to say a line. It was a moment of truth that most extras hoped for, but not Fred. He would recall adamantly telling the director, “No!”

One day while playing with the pit orchestra in the Los Angeles theater, Fred was complimented by members of a stage band on the bill, an act called The California Collegians. It so happened that a member of the Collegians had suddenly quit. They had noticed that Fred could read music, and offered him a job with their band, since none of them knew how to read music. Fred eagerly accepted. The Collegians didn’t only play music. They often worked vaudeville theaters where they did “bits of business.” Fred later recalled that they would pretend to be seals and “go flippering across the stage.” The Collegians did so well on the vaudeville circuit that they were cast by legendary Broadway producer Max Gordon for the show Three’s a Crowd.

Three’s a Crowd was a revue starring comedian Fred Allen, Clifton Webb (the movie actor, known then in the early 1930s for his dancing) and torch singer Libby Holman. Soon Fred was singled out by Holman. At one performance an actor to whom Holman was to sing the torch song “Something to Remember You By” didn’t show up and Holman needed a tall, good-looking man to sing to. Fred got the job. He was dressed as a sailor awaiting the whistle of his ship when Holman begins the ballad. His back is to the audience most of the time. At the end of the song he faces Holman and utters the line, “See you later, Baby.” Fred would recall, “I was so self conscious I wanted to break away and stumble off stage.” It was Fred’s first real introduction to his future career.

In 1933 it was producer Max Gordon to the rescue again with another Broadway show. In 'Roberta,' The Collegians would appear as the band of Huckleberry Haines (Bob Hope, in his big break). They did various pieces of business with Hope, as well as a few numbers. After a rather disappointing preview in Philadelphia, the show proved to be a big hit in New York. One of the big reasons for the show’s success was the introduction of a new song, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (by Jerome Kern).

The “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” number was introduced by a bevy of show girls and one in particular caught Fred’s eye. She was a dancer named Lillian Lamonte, and Fred later said, “When I saw her, I got smoke in my eyes.” In their spare time Fred and Lillian (or Lily, as he called her) would go for long walks and take in the movies. They soon found themselves falling in love. Fred did the test, playing a scene from Roberta, and later told Lily that he thought it was a “disaster.” A few days later, however, word arrived that Paramount wanted him for a standard seven-year contract with options every six months.

Fred returned to California as a contract player with Paramount Pictures, one of the biggest and busiest movie studios in Hollywood. He was earning around $75 per week and living with his mother. In the first months of his contract he did little more than take acting and diction lessons and appeared in occasional screen tests with other struggling actors. He was finally loaned out to Warner Brothers to appear in a comedy starring Charlie Ruggles called Friends of Mr. Sweeney. The role did little to advance his career, and he returned to Paramount feeling that his option would not be renewed.

At this point he was assigned to a film, again on loan out, at RKO, called Grand Old Girl, with Mary Carlisle and May Robson. Fred was cast as the male juvenile lead. He played a truck driver who romances Carlisle, but as Fred would later recall, “the important thing is that I could say my lines and munch popcorn at the same time.” Indeed, it was his ability to munch while speaking which brought Fred to the attention of director Wesley Ruggles. Ruggles, the brother of actor Charlie Ruggles, was preparing a Paramount film to star one of the studio’s most important actresses, Claudette Colbert. Ruggles was in need of a leading man. His first choice, Franchot Tone, was not available, and Cary Grant was considered too British to play the all-American part of the platonic reporter friend of Colbert in the film, which would be retitled The Gilded Lily. Ruggles discussed the problem in casting this part with his brother Charlie, who told him about a young man, Fred MacMurray, he had just worked with in Friends of Mr. Sweeney that he felt “had something.” Wesley Ruggles trusted his brother’s instincts and screened both Friends of Mr. Sweeney and Grand Old Girl. He came away impressed by Fred’s naturalism on film—yes, he was raw, but he definitely had potential. He also came away impressed by the scene in Grand Old Girl in which Fred ate popcorn in a believable way while delivering his lines.

That was important because in The Gilded Lily there is a running plot point where the platonic friends debate such vital issues as “popcorn vs. peanuts” while munching same. Ruggles told the Paramount front office about his decision to cast the young contract player in the new Claudette Colbert comedy The Gilded Lily, but the front office was under whelmed by the prospect of teaming their big star with an untried talent. Ruggles realized that he would need to enlist the support of Colbert. He said to her that there was a new actor on the lot that “all the girls are crazy about” and asked her to screen Grand Old Girl. Colbert did and came away feeling the same as Ruggles.

When Fred was told to report to the set of The Gilded Lily as Claudette Colbert’s new leading man he said that he felt as if “all the air was sucked out of me.” He couldn’t believe that a star of Colbert’s magnitude would want him as her leading man. After a sleepless night, Fred arrived in the morning for the first day of shooting with a severe case of nerves that Colbert could detect a mile away. When they were introduced to one another Fred was still shaking and Colbert said, “Now, what are you so frightened about?” Her positive attitude helped put Fred at ease. Colbert would later say that she found Fred “adorable.” She helped him with line delivery and feeling at ease in front of the camera, but one thing she couldn’t help with was the love scene. All through Fred’s career he would enact dozens of love scenes with many different leading ladies, but he was always ill at ease. Fred would later explain, “sometimes a writer writes a scene where a guy says ‘Hi’ to indicate his love for the girl —I play those scenes very well.” “I like Mr. MacMurray,” Louella Parsons wrote. “He has a certain appealing wholesomeness.” The film was honored as one of the ten best of the year by the National Board of Review. The success was a great break for Fred and also for Paramount which now had a brand-new leading man who could work well with their many top leading ladies, without being blown off the screen by them. There was something special about his masculine presence. Perhaps growing up in a house with so many women shaped him in a unique way. Good looking and athletic, Fred was never threatening or overbearing. Soon he was in demand by other actresses charmed by his comforting masculinity.

Katharine Hepburn and director George Stevens choose him to be her leading man in the RKO adaptation of the popular Booth Tarkington novel, Alice Adams. This film, which also proved very successful, went a long way toward furthering Fred’s romantic image. Film historian Foster Hirsch commented on the Hepburn-MacMurray teaming: “In Alice Adams and Woman of the Year, Stevens uncovered a lovely naturalness beneath Katharine Hepburn’s usual hauteur; pairing her with straightforward, homespun actors like Fred MacMurray and Spencer Tracy. Stevens released her from her mannerist excesses.”

There was one other key teaming during the 1930s that Fred enjoyed with an actress—the delectable and beautiful Carole Lombard. Fred made four films with Lombard between 1935 and 1937. While they cannot be considered the best of Lombard’s great comedy films of the 1930s, they are quite good and very funny. The best of the lot was the first, Hands Across the Table. Leisen originally wanted Gary Cooper for Hands Across the Table but, as was the case with Franchot Tone and The Gilded Lily, Cooper was unavailable. Leisen decided to go ahead with Fred, but still thought that he was rather raw. Leisen found that Fred still fought occasional nerves when facing the camera, and enlisted Lombard to help loosen him up. Fred had an immediate rapport with Lombard and was both fascinated and amused by her well-known penchant for profanity.

Fred MacMurray and Lillian Lamont return to Los Angeles from their honeymoon in Hawaii aboard the Matson liner Malolo, July 1936.

Lily, who came out to California once it became clear that Fred was no flash in the pan, and married him in 1936, asked him if he enjoyed working with Carole Lombard. Fred replied, “I’ve never heard anybody use such language—man or woman—she’s wonderful!” While Fred was becoming well known as a dependable light leading man in romantic comedies opposite such high-powered leading ladies as Lombard and Colbert, he also showed his versatility. There was the romantic drama The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), with Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda; and the adventure-comedy Thirteen Hours by Air (1936) with Joan Bennett.

Fred began the ‘40s in style with one of his best films, the romantic comedy-drama Remember the Night, opposite Barbara Stanwyck. This would be the first of four films that Fred would make with Stanwyck, and while the high point of their screen collaboration would be 1944’s Double Indemnity, both actors are outstanding in this Preston Sturges-scribed and Mitchell Leisen-directed film. Stanwyck plays a woman arrested for shoplifting just before Christmas. Fred plays the prosecuting attorney who tricks Stanwyck’s public defender, an old blowhard, to orate so long that the case is held over, thus keeping her in jail until after the holidays. Fred feels guilty and arranges her bail. As it turns out, both have mothers in Indiana, so he offers to drive her home. At her mother’s house, she is cruelly rejected, so Fred takes her home with him where she can see can enjoy a real family Christmas.

From 1940-1944, Fred was incredibly busy because so many leading men had joined the military. During these years Fred made twenty films. He was loaned out frequently: to Twentieth Century-Fox for Little Old New York, opposite Alice Faye; to Columbia, for the delightful Too Many Husbands, with Jean Arthur; to Warners for Dive Bomber, with Errol Flynn; and back to Columbia for The Lady Is Willing, opposite the very willing Marlene Dietrich, who made no bones that she wanted to bed her handsome co-star. (Just as she had done with other leading men, including Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.) Director Mitchell Leisen told Dietrich to keep her hands off because Fred was “too much in love” with Lily.

Fred was then cast as Joan Crawford’s leading man in the final film of her long-running MGM contract, Above Suspicion. It was in late 1943 that Fred began production on the finest film of his career, one of the authentic classics of the American cinema and perhaps the best film noir of all-time, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. Co-written by Wilder and hard-boiled crime novelist Raymond Chandler (who often feuded during the writing process), Double Indemnity tells the story of a slick insurance salesman, Walter Neff, who always has one eye cocked for a good-looking dame. He doesn’t have to look far when he goes to the home of a customer, Dietrichson, and finds the man’s sexy and seductive wife, Phyllis. He’s only too willing to work on Phyllis instead—and how. What he doesn’t realize is that Phyllis is more than ready to go to work on him. Taking full advantage of her sex appeal, she convinces him to murder her husband. Neff, for his part, cooks up a plan which would pay Phyllis “double indemnity” on her husband’s insurance policy. They think they can get away with murder, but Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator, Barton Keyes, smells a rat, and their scheme begins to unravel.

When Double Indemnity was released in the summer of 1944, it was an immediate box office and critical success. Fred’s performance, so different from what he had ever done before, was lauded. Variety pointed out that Fred had “never been better.” His hard-boiled, smug, jive-talking Walter Neff is one of the best performances of 1944, but when the Academy Award noms were announced he wasn’t on the list of nominees for best actor. Instead, Paramount put its money behind Bing Crosby’s easy-going Father O’Malley in the even more popular Going My Way. If Fred’s Walter Neff was the triumph of a fine actor bravely exploring new territory, Father O’Malley was just a typical Crosby character with a priest’s collar added. Nevertheless, the safe role won Crosby the Oscar.

Fred MacMurray and Helen Walker in "Murder, He Says" (1945) directed by George Marshall

After filming Double Indemnity Fred’s long-term contract with Paramount was almost over. Fred wanted more say in the roles he played. The final film of his Paramount contract is one of his best comedies, the daffy Murder, He Says, in which Fred plays a pollster who is looking for a missing colleague and runs afoul of Marjorie Main and her murderous hillbilly brood. Released only a year after Frank Capra’s similar black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, Murder, He Says stands on its own. In fact, critic Pauline Kael believed that Murder, He Says was superior to Arsenic and Old Lace. Certainly Fred’s performance is more modulated than Cary Grant’s constant mugging and actually funnier because of it. (Grant, perhaps the greatest comedy film actor of all-time, was never happy with his performance in Arsenic and Old Lace.)

Joan Leslie was also impressed working with Fred. She found him very helpful to her and willing to rehearse, which was something that director Gregory Ratoff frowned upon. When asked why all the great leading ladies of her time wanted to work with Fred MacMurray, Leslie replied, “He was tops! A very good actor who made a splendid appearance... if it was a Fred MacMurray picture it would be fun —he could do it all.”

Paulette Goddard and Fred MacMurray in "Suddently It's Spring" (1947) directed by Mitchell Leisen

Over the next few years Fred’s screen offerings as a freelancer were a decidedly mixed bag. He returned to Paramount for a final film for director Mitchell Leisen, and a good one it was, Suddenly, It’s Spring, opposite Paulette Goddard; and then to Universal, opposite Claudette Colbert, for one of his biggest box office hits. In The Egg and I the Colbert-MacMurray chemistry proved potent as ever and audiences were delighted. The film with its bizarre and colorful characters hatched a load of laughs, and launched a series of low-budget programmers starring two supporting players, Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as Ma and Pa Kettle.

The best that could be said of Singapore was that it at least allowed Fred a new, young, and attractive leading lady in Ava Gardner, but it wasn’t enough to redeem a tired plot involving amnesia, exotic locations, and missing jewels. His final film with Claudette Colbert, Family Honeymoon, convinced both of them that they had seen better days and they mutually decided that this would be their final teaming. He was then teamed with Irene Dunne in Never a Dull Moment, which reminded viewers and critics alike of the similarly-themed and more successful The Egg and I.

After appearing opposite Claire Trevor in Borderline, a film which steered and erratic course between comedy and film noir, Fred made a wonderful screwball comedy called A Millionaire for Christy opposite a surprisingly funny and blonde Eleanor Parker. But the film’s box office failure convinced Fred that his kind of comedy was becoming passe.

In the early ‘50s Fred’s personal life took a front seat to his film career. Fred had always been devoted to his wife Lily who, during the course of their 17-year marriage, was often in frail health. He was also close to his adopted children, Susan and Robert. When the family wanted to get away from Hollywood they would pack up and move off to Fred’s ranch along the Russian River in Sonoma County, California. In 1951, Lily’s heart and kidneys began to weaken, and Fred put his career on hold. Lily was bedridden for much of the time and Fred spent considerable time with her reading and keeping her company, but Lily was also convinced that Fred needed to return to work to keep his own morale up. In her last months Lily could do little more than lie in bed and read, and one of the items she read was the script for The Caine Mutiny that producer Stanley Kramer had sent to Fred’s attention. Lily recognized that the film, based on a best-selling novel, would be a huge success and urged Fred to play the role of the opportunistic Lt. Tom Keefer. Just after Fred signed on to play Keefer, Lily died, leaving Fred devastated.

The Caine Mutiny had an all-star cast led by Humphrey Bogart as Capt. Queeg, a naval officer experiencing battle fatigue. Van Johnson was Lt. Maryk, who takes command of the USS Caine away from Queeg in order to save the ship during a typhoon. Jose Ferrer plays Lt. Barney Greenwald, a Navy lawyer who defends Lt. Maryk at his court martial. Despite his successful defense of Maryk, Greenwald is disgusted with himself for the part he played in Queeg’s court room disgrace. Confronting MacMurray’s Lt. Keefer, who, under oath, denied his role leading up to the mutiny, Greenwald throws a drink in his face. The film was, as Lily predicted, a big hit.

Following The Caine Mutiny, Fred stayed on at Columbia where he was signed to star in another film like Double Indemnity. Pushover gave Fred yet another chance to show his dark side, playing a cop who goes bad because of his lust for a woman. This time the blonde femme fatale is played by Kim Novak. One of the reasons Fred was signed for his part was because studio head Harry Cohn wanted to make sure that Novak had a strong leading man who could help the new leading lady in her first starring role. Novak always gave Fred credit for boosting her confidence with his help and sensitivity. Fred, for his part, knew firsthand how difficult it was to be a new actor in an important role in a major film, and was only too willing to help the young and inexperienced Novak. On New Year’s Eve 1953 Fred was invited to a party thrown by his friend John Wayne, but he wasn’t much interested in going. He never was a big partygoer, and besides it was only five months since Lily died, and the thought of New Year’s Eve without her was difficult. Fred’s business manager, Bo Roos, and his wife urged him to go and “take his mind off of things for a while.” Finally, Fred agreed, but only if he could take his sax. Fred was sitting in with the band at the party when bubbly blonde actress June Haver danced past the bandstand with handsome British leading man Laurence Harvey. Fred did take notice of Haver and later, when everyone was sitting down for dinner, he sat next to Haver, who also was dateless. They ended up talking much of the night and found that in their mutual sorrow they had much in common. From that day forward they began to see each other constantly, and their relationship was solidified when Haver accompanied Fred, and several other stars, in the spring of 1954 on a goodwill tour of Latin America.

Just days after the one-year anniversary of Lily’s passing June Haver became Mrs. Fred MacMurray, and with the exception of working with Fred in a special starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in 1958, she retired from show business to devote her time to Fred and her two stepchildren. According to Debbie Reynolds, Fred had fallen in love with June in a big way. Eventually, June and Fred would adopt two little red-headed girls, Laurie and Kate, to complete their family.

Fred was happily contemplating a new career as a Disney leading man when Billy Wilder reentered his life in the fall of 1959. In The Apartment, a satire of sex in the business place, Wilder had cast Jack Lemmon in the pivotal role as a corporate nobody who is pressured to lend his apartment as a trysting place for married executives. Shirley MacLaine is cast as an elevator girl who is one of the corporate mistresses. Burly character leading man Paul Douglas was cast as philandering boss J.D. Sheldrake, but unfortunately, Douglas collapsed and died of a heart attack just prior to filming. Wilder put out an SOS call to Fred offering him the part of the amoral Sheldrake. Once again Fred was reluctant to play a heavy for Wilder, especially now that he was working with the family-friendly Walt Disney. “He told me he couldn’t do it,” Wilder later said, “he was making movies for kids now and he just couldn’t spoil this image by playing a rat. I told him he could and would and he did—and he was superb.” Jack Lemmon later said that Fred was “terrific” as Sheldrake and his casting actually improved the film: “the fact is that the Sheldrake character had to be attractive enough to make a girl like Shirley fall for him, and Fred was able to do that better, I felt, than Paul Douglas, fine actor that he was. Fred made it work out wonderfully.” The Apartment went on to be a very big hit when it was released in 1960, and was later named the Best Picture by the Academy. Both Lemmon and MacLaine were also nominated, but, as had been the case with Double Indemnity, Fred was overlooked despite his first-rate performance.

With a schedule of 65 days per year and excellent money, Fred finally decided he would be a “fool” to turn it down and signed on to play the role of Steve Douglas. This decision added to Fred’s professional resurgence when My Three Sons debuted in the fall of 1960 and became one of the most successful new shows of that year. In fact, My Three Sons would win high audience ratings for much of its twelve-year (1960-1972) run. In taking on this role in a television series, Fred accomplished something else. He proved that an actor could have, simultaneously, successful careers in both television and movies. Up to that time film stars pretty much stayed away from TV series work. The few film stars who did go to television did so after their film careers had pretty much drawn to a close, such as Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy. Fred was an exception because between the years 1961-1967 while he was starring in My Three Sons on television, he was making films for Walt Disney studios that became big box office hits. In this respect, Fred was even more successful than his more prestigious contemporaries such as Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda who never had his level of success in a TV series.

The second peak of Fred’s career was in some ways more successful than his initial peak of stardom. He found a whole new generation of fans, who had absolutely no idea who the romantic leading man of the 1930s and ‘40s was, but who loved his harried and wise father figure in My Three Sons. They responded to his Disney creations as well, especially his wacky college prof who discovers flying rubber (“Flubber”) in The Absent Minded Professor (1961) and its equally successful sequel Son of Flubber (1963). Then there was his small-town storekeeper who contributes to his community by becoming a scoutmaster in the underrated Follow Me, Boys! (1966). In between there was the slightly risque (by Disney standards) Bon Voyage! (1962). He also played the “First Gentleman” married to the first woman president (Polly Bergen) in Kisses for My President (1964, the only non-Disney film that Fred made during this period). His final film of this productive decade, the elaborate musical-comedy The Happiest Millionaire (1967), had him slightly miscast as an overbearing millionaire fitness nut.

After My Three Sons went off the air in 1972 (co-star Beverly Garland would recall that Fred was disappointed losing the show because it was “his thing”), Fred eased into semi-retirement. He kept his name before the public by appearing in television guest shots on variety shows, specials, and award shows, such as annual presentations of the American Film Institute Life Achievement Awards to such friends and co-workers as Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck and Billy Wilder. As for himself, he would not receive much recognition. His industry colleagues continued to take him for granted and seemed to believe he just played himself. His wife, June, later would say that Fred didn’t let that bother him because he got his satisfaction from the people of all ages who continued to recognize him on the street or send him fan mail by the hundreds each month. In the mid-1980s he did receive two awards that meant a great deal to him. The Walt Disney organization presented him with the first “Disney Legends” award for his contribution to the Walt Disney organization. And his home state of Wisconsin inducted him into the Wisconsin Performing Hall of Fame in a ceremony he attended in Milwaukee.

At the ceremony his wife June read a poem she wrote in his honor: “From Beaver Dam here is a man, not a mouse/I’m glad to have this man around my house.” During the course of the evening film clips from some of Fred’s best films were shown as well as scenes of him as Steve Douglas in My Three Sons. The award presentation was made by David Zucker and Fred, looking fragile, and overwhelmed by the honor, simply said, “Gee, I’m glad I came —I’m honored” and went on to invite the folks who were attending from his hometown of Beaver Dam to visit him: “Just knock on my door and say ‘Beaver Dam.’” Shortly after Thanksgiving, 1987, Fred had a recurrence of throat cancer he thought he had conquered in the late ‘70s. He underwent treatments and the cancer seemed to go into remission. But then, just after Christmas of 1988, he suffered a stroke which partially affected his right side and his speaking. He underwent months of physical therapy and his doctors said he had recovered about 90%, but he remained weak for the remaining two years of his life. Yet, he never let it affect his good nature and humor.

In these final years his “sons” from My Three Sons kept in touch with him. Don Grady, who played Robbie, the middle son, was a special favorite of Fred’s and he recalled, “I would call his house to speak to him.” He recalls that the final time he spoke with Fred, “he couldn’t make it down the stairs to talk to me, but his humor never failed him—he had it to the end.” In early November 1991 Fred’s health took a turn for the worse and he developed a urinary track infection which quickly turned into a serious blood infection. A day after entering the hospital with June and his two daughters at this side (his son Robert, who lived in Hawaii, and daughter Susan, who lived in Arkansas, were en route) Fred peacefully died. He was 83 years old. His passing became front page news and led evening newscasts.

A week after Fred’s passing People magazine did a cover story on Fred, and Fred’s TV son Don Grady summed up for many the effect Fred MacMurray had on people of all ages. He recalled a reunion of Disney Mousketeers (of which Grady was one) held at the Hollywood Bowl. There were various celebrities in the audience, including Fred. One by one they were introduced, mostly to polite applause, but when Fred was introduced, Grady said that “You heard the entire bowl go ‘Ahhhh!’ and this warm gush came out of everyone.” Grady had never truly understood the effect Fred had on people until that moment. On his 80th birthday Fred was asked how he wanted to be remembered. He replied in his usual simple way, “Fondly.” He got his wish. -The remarkable Fred MacMurray By Charles Tranberg Source: filmsofthegoldenage.com

The main thing about MacMurray was that he never considered himself a star. He didn't have to put that on. That's what made him a wonderful character. He was friendly, but he was not intimate. He kept to himself a great deal without seeming to be out, he just--he was like that; he never held you off at arm's length, but at the same time you couldn't get to him because of his -he had a protective quality like a layer of varnish all over him that kept people from boring in. I think he was always appreciative of the fact of what good fortune had happened to him.

At one time, I guess he thought he was going to be a musician all of his life, and then suddenly he's brought to a major studio and becomes a major leading man. He never got caught up in the trappings of Hollywood, and I think all of that came from the midwestern beginnings and the solid input that he had from his family. He was one of those what I call an honest actor. He was a self-contained person. That's highly unusual for an actor. He had inner strength. He was very strong. He didn't want to let people in on what he was thinking all the time and I think that definitely came across on screen. Fred was the best thing that ever happened to June Haver, and I must say probably the reverse is true, too. Best thing that happened to Fred was June. Source: livedash.ark.com

Jake Gyllenhaal out & about with Naomi Foner and Alyssa Miller

Jake Gyllenhaal out for a stroll with mom Naomi Foner and model Alyssa Miller on July 13 2013, in New York City

Jake Gyllenhaal stepped out for a romantic brunch with his new girlfriend, model Alyssa Miller, on Sunday... but there was another VIP along for the Manhattan treat. The couple held hands as they walked down the street with Alyssa's dog Charlie and Jake's mom, screenwriter Naomi Foner. The trio looked cosy enough, and at least Naomi had Alyssa's dog Charlie to make up the numbers.

Jake was first linked to the Sports Illustrated model since June when they were spotted kissing during a romantic bike ride, again in Manhattan. The 24-year-old model loves between the east and west coasts, but she and Gyllenhaal, 32, have been conducting their courtship in the Big Apple. She recently travelled to Vegas with fellow SI models Chrissy Teigen and Nina Agdal. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

The Book and the Film: the 70th Anniversary of James M. Cain’s ‘Double Indemnity’

"I stared into the darkness some more that night. I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman. The woman was a killer, out-and-out, and she had made a fool of me. She had used me for a cat’s paw so she could have another man, and she had enough on me to hang me higher than a kite. . . I got to laughing, a hysterical cackle, there in the dark.” -James M. Cain’s character Walter Huff reflects on his crimes in the classic arc of the 'Double Indemnity' novel.

It's been 70 years since James M. Cain wrote the emblematic novel 'Double Indemnity,' which was published in 1943 in the volume 'Three of a Kind' (the story originally appeared as an eight-part serial in Liberty magazine in 1936). 'Double Indemnity' was filmed in 1944, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. Walter in the book is portrayed as a man who is already a criminal by inclination and a acute sociopath.

In contrast, in the film he's made out to be a man who feels disappointed with his humdrum work, morally cracking, and only in hindsight he sees he should not have gotten involved with Phyllis Dietrichson. Billy Wilder managed to create one of the most iconic cinematic entries of the noir genre, with the inestimable help by legendary scribe Raymond Chandler (who collaborated with Wilder on translating Cain's novel into an incendiary screen script for which he received an Academy Award nomination.)

Walter Huff (Walter Neff played by Fred MacMurray) doesn't think of his victim, Mr. Nirdlinger (in the film Mr. Dietrichson) as a living human being, but only as an imaginary construct who obstructs his way to wealth goods and his object of desire. Cleverly, Cain does not allow the reader to know much of Nirdlinger (being mentioned only twice in the novel) This theme reveals one of Cain's main motifs in the novel, the latent instinct man harbors to kill without logical forethought.

The irrepressible attractions of sexuality and greed are part of Walter's motivation to kill, but Cain realizes that an ordinary working man with no outward criminal tendencies can allow himself to be driven to murder -- certainly one of the most nightmarish visions of modern man found in literature. Cain's other major theme in Double Indemnity is guilt and how it operates in the minds of his characters.

Barbara Stanwyck (who had played one of the most heartless femme fatales in 1933's 'Baby Face') molds her character into a blend of remorseless seductress and the Chandlerian ideal of the romanticized dame who is dangerous despite of herself, less of the mentally ill character of the novel (Phyllis: "Maybe I'm crazy. But there's something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I'm so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness....") and more reminiscent of bad girl Velma who commits suicide in 'Farewell My Lovely' (written by Raymond Chandler in 1940).

Walter Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger live in a society where one's wish can come true fairly quickly and with fairly little effort, a society where furniture is bought on easy-payment plans, where bungalows are rented in the Hollywood Hills for fifteen dollars a week, where single professional men can hire a maid and still afford to drive a new car. This is not the waste land of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' (1934) -- it's a more civilized world, but because of its orderliness, the murder is far more devastating.

The film amplifies the sensuality from Cain's pages: “Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts," recreating a suffocatingly muggy atmosphere with veiled allusions to the honeysuckle fragrance and an ankle bracelet, escalating into a bleak malaise scenario. One of the peculiarities of Cain's narrator is his unwillingness to divulge certain details of his chronicle, such as the grisly aspects surrounding the murder. This technique served Cain's brand of selective realism, thereby allowing the reader to invent at least part of the story.

James Naremore saw 'Pushover' (1954) directed by Richard Quine -which was called by The New York Times 'a mild facsimile of Double Indemnity'- as belonging to the same mood of obscure fascination that Double Indemnity had generated ten years ago, starring also Fred MacMurray, this time playing a jaded cop who is investigating a robber's moll (Kim Novak) and plans to get away with her and the stolen money.

The plot advances in a similar structure than 'Double Indemnity,' although we can appreciate remarkable differences, being the most important the factor of disillusionment that plagues Pushover throughout its forlorn urbane set.

Walter Neff is a self-assured insurance salesman who knows all the tricks to deceive his company (fatally clashing with his boss Barton Keyes, played adroitly by Edward G. Robinson) and coldly falls in the perverse Phyllis's arms (their embraces spark heat but their passion is ice cold), whereas Paul Sheridan (the aging cop from 'Pushover' is tired of his work routine and the phony 'decent' aspirations of his boring partners).

The oneiric effect in 'Double Indemnity' allows us interpret it as a dream, one in which Lola (Jean Heather) represents Walter's actual wife (ironically MacMurray wears a wedding ring although he's supposed to be single in the story) threatened by Phyllis (his fantasy woman) and Nino Zachetti stands for the young Walter at the time he fell in love with Lola.

Phyllis can be seen as a projection of his dark side, which will lead him to suicide by killing Phyllis -- she can't do that second shot because she isn't real-- and the dictaphone scene is his final confession to Keyes after betraying his trust. In this alternate take, Mr. Dietrichson would be Walter's father in law (whom he'd conned using his daughter Lola's help).

Also, Walter dies in order to escape the corporate business city and arising homosexual culture Keyes symbolizes. 'Double Indemnity' is one of the most definitive allegories of the 'double indentity' of the American common man that paradoxically so well befitted Fred MacMurray (whose portrait feels uncomfortably subversive due to the actors' affable image).

'Pushover' is a reverse tale despite of its similar structure and hardboiled tone. Paul Sheridan looks for that special woman of his dreams, he's a damaged romantic (his sensitivity was harmed by his parent's unhappy marriage) who detests the typical housewive-types pursued by his cop partners. The irony is he'll be brought down by the decent nurse in the film (played by Dorothy Malone) which will definitely seal his doomed romance with Lona (Kim Novak), a lonely vamp who is as lost and broken as Paul in an increasingly hostile policial state America was becoming in the '50s. "I thought I told you to go," Paul recriminates Lona when she decides to stand by him in the wake of his death. "We really didn't need that money, did we?", is the defeated cop's last heartbreaking line.

Article first published as The Book and the Film: the 70th Anniversary of James M. Cain’s ‘Double Indemnity’ on Blogcritics

Jake Gyllenhaal walks the dog in New York City

Jake Gyllenhaal walking a friend's dog in New York City, on July 10, 2013

Trying to blend into the crowd in a grey T-shirt and baseball cap, the 32-year-old listened to music as he spent a relaxed day with his canine companion. The Prisoners star might have been linked to Sports Illustrated model Alyssa, but the 24-year-old was nowhere to be seen during the A-lister's low-key jaunt.


With his headphones firmly plugged into his ears, the actor seemed to be getting into his music, tapping away on his phone as he sat back. Later on, he emerged with his little black and white dog in tow, holding him on a long black lead as they set off together. And the Donnie Darko star seemed to be trying to blend into the crowd, despite his A-list status, dressing down in baggy black trousers and a plain grey T-shirt. He wore a pair of Nike trainers, a navy baseball cap and a pair of dark glasses as he tried to go incognito.


Jake set tongues wagging about his new relationship when the pair were reportedly spotted dining together at The Dutch in SoHo.
He was previously rumoured to be dating another swimsuit model, Emily DiDonato, but the couple are said to have split after just a few months.


Jake Gyllenhaal at The Beach Plum Inn & Restaurant in Martha's Vineyard on 1st July 2013

The A-lister seemed to be making the most of his time off before he starts his promo tour for forthcoming films Prisoners, in which he plays a cop pursuing a child kidnapper, released on September 20. He is also set to start shooting for new Rob Marshall film Into The Woods, as well as romantic comedy Nailed. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Fred MacMurray (Love is Here) video

Fred MacMurray (Love is Here) video

Fred MacMurray & Carole Lombard in "Hands Across the Table" (1935) directed by Mitchell Leisen.

Noir Alleys & the American Dream

The parallel between cinema and dreams is almost as old as film itself. Early surrealist filmmakers, for example, saw the mental production of dream images as analogous to the cutting necessary for film editing (Gabbard and Gabbard). But movie dreams are not solitary: as C. J. Pennethorne Hughes observed back in 1930, cinema is “the transmuted and regulated dream life of the people”. And if films are dreams, so dreams are often films: Jean-Louis Baudry reminds us how often a dreamer will wake and say, “It was like in a movie”. Hollywood is not called “the dream factory” for nothing. Not only do movies influence American dreams in a metaphorical sense, by furnishing stories that shape audiences’ ideas about success, selftransformation, love and a host of other themes; they also provide images and situations for actual dreams, which may resemble thrillers, horror movies, detective stories, or romances. Indeed, some of the cinematic dreams I examine below generate a kind of mise en abyme: a dream within a movie that alludes to other movie dreams. Thus, as Vicky Lebeau notes, because dreams inevitably partake of the culture at large, dream theory supports a “psychoanalytic study of culture”. Films noir serve this function better than most movie genres, for they are full of bad dreams; indeed, the picture many describe as the first film noir, Boris Ingster’s 1940 Stranger on the Third Floor, features a lengthy dream sequence that fosters the protagonist’s change of heart and forecasts his incarceration. More generally, Nicholas Christopher remarks that the noir cycle constitutes the “complex mosaic of a single, thirteen-year urban dreamscape.”

Janet Leigh and Van Heflin in "Act of Violence" (1948) directed by Fred Zinneman

Some veterans don’t lose their memories but have been stripped of their emotional resilience and their humanity. Yet they wish to reenact or recapture their warrior life —its camaraderie, its intensity, its clear sense of purpose—and return to the very incidents that traumatized them. In these reenactment scenes, which appear in almost all of the films discussed below, noir vets display the clinical symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, characterized by “persistent, intrusive reexperiencing of the traumatic event through flashbacks and recurrent dreams with persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, numbing of general responsiveness and persistent symptoms of increased arousal” (Theodore Nadelson).

Such traumatic episodes exemplify what Roger Luckhurst, paraphrasing Cathy Caruth, calls a “crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time”: that is, because the events are generally not consciously incorporated into the characters’ experiences or psyches, they are not spoken or written about. In this regard that prototypical noir narrative device, the flashback, serves an essential function. Such scenes epitomize Michael Rothberg’s definition of “traumatic realism,” whereby “the claims of reference live on, but so does the traumatic extremity that disables Realist representation”: they remain unintegrated into the films’ style, as if to reflect the vets’ psychic disintegration. Noir veterans undergo purgative rituals in which their old selves die and new ones are born. Some also play out the conventions of what Arthur Frank calls the “restitution narrative” —the “culturally preferred narrative” of institutional medicine—in which the agent is not the patient but a drug, a doctor, or, as in many vet noirs, a woman.

Restitution and Revenge: Two later vet noirs present similar quests by ex-soldiers: each veteran seeks to repay or vindicate a friend’s death and thereby release his own feelings of loss and betrayal ("Dead Reckoning" and "Ride the Pink Horse").

In Dead Reckoning Captain Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart), learning that his missing war buddy was an indicted murderer, tries to clear his name. Lucky Gagin (Robert Montgomery), in Ride the Pink Horse, seeks restitution from the mobster who killed his wartime friend, Shorty Thompson. Both vets struggle with PTSD, and both encounter women who serve as catalysts—in opposite ways—for their recovery. Like Cornered, these films dramatize how, as Nadelson writes, trauma victims “often desperately try to regain control by repeating and revisiting the event in dreams, fantasies, or re-enactments. They repeat the experience to achieve mastery, this time.”

Forging Noir Identities: “Every painting is a love affair,” according to cashier and Sunday painter Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson), in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. Cross is explaining his aesthetic principles to Katherine “Kitty” March (Joan Bennett), who later conspires with her lover, the slimy Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), to sign Cross’s paintings with her name. Cross’s words resonate beyond this film; indeed, they could provide the epigraph for a group of early films noir that depict men falling in love with a woman’s portrait.

Three films in particular—I Wake Up Screaming, Laura, and The Dark Corner— feature fetishized female images that males use to bolster their own identities or to fashion new ones. These women’s portraits become, in effect, mirrors or self-portraits of the men. In these retellings of the Galatea/Pygmalion myth each man ends up creator and forger of the woman and of himself. The pictorial representations in the films also generate two types of self-reflexivity. First, in employing the typical noir device of the framed narrative or flashback, the films analogically replicate the fashioning of these characters’ framed identities within exploitative perspectives. Second, their stories of fabricated female identities invoke Hollywood’s own fabrication of female stars in the studio system. Whereas the dream films, missing-person movies, and vet noirs test the virtues of selfreinvention and the pursuit of happiness, ultimately the forgery films’ complex aesthetic offers a more pointed challenge. In blurring the lines between originality and forgery, subjectivity and objectivity, real and representation, these films imply that human character is too malleable and complex to be framed within a single subject or explained by a single narrative. They advance the idea that identity is not an entity but a never-ending process. They thus turn upside down Franklin’s optimism about self-creation, implying that self reinvention may occur not as a result of individual choice but as an inevitable by-product of the gap between humans and our representations. Their critique of individualism is less political than philosophical and ontological, as they propose that all identities are, to some degree, forgeries.

Fractured: Steele remembers being called away from dinner with his friend Terry (Claire Trevor) by a message that his mother was ill. On the way to visit her, he became convinced his train was about to collide with another one. As the second train approaches, we see Steele and his reflection in the window: visually he is “a little fractured.” A series of quick cuts shows Steele from outside the window in full-face and in profile, both images tightly boxed within the window so that he resembles nothing so much as a portrait—of overpowering terror. He pulls the brake cord, stops the train, and collapses. But his mother was not ill, he has no train ticket, and no train wreck occurred yesterday. Perhaps, hypothesizes Lowell, his traumatic war experiences have affected his cognition. Steele is like those cognitively disabled veterans discussed in chapter 3: he can neither fully remember his traumas nor completely forget them. Yet his visual fracturing also links him to the cubist shapes and terror-ravaged faces portrayed by European modernists. Hence, his false memories indicate a rupture in his own realist aesthetic, based as it is on a congruence between representation and shared reality. Can we trust what we see or recall, especially if others don’t share our perceptions? “All of a sudden,” he confesses to Terry, “I don’t know myself. In twenty-four hours everything has become unfamiliar.” To further complicate matters, at the end Steele believes he has taken another journey, that “everybody’s nuts around this place” but himself. He remains suspended between his failure to remember what has happened to him and his inability to recover from his war injury.



Here Crack-Up (1946) augments the other vet noirs’ challenge to the American ideal of self-reinvention. If Steele, a war hero and famous exponent of truth, can’t start over, then can anyone in postwar America do so? And from what fragments will we paint our new self-portrait? Neither the shards of demolished European high culture nor embattled pictorial realism seem quite up to the task. The split portrait thus comes to represent America’s fissured psyche as well as the film’s—and indeed, film noir’s—divided aesthetic. All are a little fractured. -"Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream" (2012) by Mark Osteen

Fatality and Identification in Noir Films

An icy blonde whose trademark hairstyle - a cascade of golden tresses that obscured one heavy-lidded eye - remained among the enduring images of Hollywood glamour, Veronica Lake was for a time, one of the most popular and sought-after actresses in motion pictures. She starred in a handful of features that, though the years, earned legendary status, including the film noirs, "This Gun for Hire" (1942) and "The Blue Dahlia" (1946), as well as the smart comedies, "Sullivan's Travels" (1941) and "I Married a Witch" (1942). She also motivated a generation of women to imitate her cool sexuality and chic style, at the same time, causing an equal number of men - particularly fighting WWII G.I.s - to fall for her. Unfortunately, her success was short-lived, her star fizzling under the weight of personal tragedies, gossip and mental illness. Despite her fall from grace, Lake stood the test of time as a Tinseltown icon, inspiring tribute in songs, literature, and movies - most notably Kim Basinger's Academy Award-winning turn in "L.A. Confidential" (1997), as a prostitute whose glacial beauty is modeled after Lake. Source: www.tcm.com

The famed "fascination and destnictiveness" of the femme fatale is, however, always enigmatic, and the power she wields is typically far in excess of her material presence.' One way of understanding this paradox is to say that the femme fatale functions neither literally nor allegorically but synecdochically within noir cinema, as a screen: as both herself and the bearer of a projected image. Now we can begin to recognize how noir negotiates between two versions of fascination: as the inherent property of a certain object, eliciting the gaze, or as relational and fantasmatic, projected by certain subjects. [...] renaming her the femme fascinant, the essence of film fascination, in noir both woman and film are invested with the power of fascination by the homme fasciné. For there is almost always one-and only one-for whom fascination with the femme as image proves fatal.

The scenario of Lang's The Woman in the Window is especially clear in this respect. Three friends-a district attorney, an old doctor, and a professor of psychology-all fantasize about the painting of their "dream girl," but only the expert on Freud falls for his fantasy. The synecdochic function of the femlne fatale is clear: she embodies one type of cinematic experience, a certain relation to the image, an exception to the rule.

In line with Mary Ann Doane's reading of the femme fatale as a doubly traumatizing "figure of fascination," in that she articulates not only a threat to male subjectivity but to a system of signification based on faith in the image: certain noir narratives became cinematically self-reflexive and made visible a moral or political preoccupation with film's power of fascination, in relation to the demands of negotiating fascination historically in the sphere of desire and death.

In the case of Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), the invocation of Hollywood cinema's complicity is emphasized by the voice-over's open challenge to the audience's capacity for belief ("You're going to tell me you don't believe me!") and its desire to forget ("Did you ever want to cut away a piece of your memory and blot it out? You can't, you know!"). Variations on the theme connect such different films as The Spiral Staircase (Siodmak, 1946), a Gothic tale of trauma that begins with an extraordinary scene juxtaposing audience fascination and a brutal murder; Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947), often paired with The Killers for the lethal return of the past and the fascinating allure of its femme fatale, and Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947), in which the sight of acute male lack coincides with a radical restriction in camera point of view.

Swede relates to Kitty as spectator to image: he only has eyes for her, so that the room becomes a kind of cinema for Swede. It is as if he had kept his date but passed through the screen to encounter his fantasmatic image of a woman, animated like Alice's painting in the window in Lang's movie or, even more precisely (given the resemblance of their dark cross-strap dresses), like the uncanny portrait in Otto Preminger's Laura (1944). The body of the homme fasciné ends "near tore in half," proof that contact with the image is lethal.

We might conclude that what noir criticism has failed to reckon with is noir cinema's own engagement with fascination. How the movies themselves understand fascination historically has remained obscure, while fascination in noir has much to do with the obscurity and obscuring, the loss of history itself. Logically enough, our "objective" critical distance is also already inscribed reflexively within certain noir films, but with a twist that is crucial to their affective appeal: when the dispassionate analytical eye triumphs over a gaze distorted by desire, it feels like a defeat, suggesting that what must be recovered is in fact precisely the naive affinity, the apparently uncritical and unhistorical "identificatory" note, suggested by Michael Walker's "unsolved mystery": what at first appears as a simple internal contradiction between fact and fantasy, typically embodied by the central character(s) in the split between knowledge and belief, breaks down; and as it does so, it opens up what Tom Conley calls the "median area, between spectators' fantasies and the facts of the film." -"Film Noir Fascination: Outside History" by Oliver Harris (Cinema Journal, Vol. 43, No. 1., Fall 2003)

James Naremore uses the example of "Double Indemnity" to illustrate what he terms "performance within performance" whereby the film character is also performing a role in the diegesis. Fred MacMurray plays the role of Walter Neff who falls for the wife of a potential client; playing innocent to his superior Walter Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). For Richard De Cordova, this masking of "dissimulation" is a common model in film noir. Sylvia Harvey (Woman's Place: The Absent Family in Film Noir) argues than a canonical noir text as "Double Indemnity" stages the woman as a sign of desire for insurance salesman Walter Neff, an emblematic alienated male in an economy driven by corporations rather than individuals. -"A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer & Helen Hanson