Fred MacMurray in his early years

During a brief period in the early forties, he was the highest paid actor in Hollywood. He worked with some of the greatest directors in the industry - King Vidor, William Wellman, Billy Wilder, George Stevens, Douglas Sirk, and the always underrated Mitchell Leisen and Wesley Ruggles.  He played opposite such screen legends as Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, Jean Arthur, Kim Novak, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Alice Faye…the list goes on. Yet, despite a filmography that would make any contemporary actor look insignificant in comparison, Fred MacMurray never received an Oscar nomination for any performance and is mainly remember today for either his long-running TV sitcom “My Three Sons” or his Walt Disney movies (my introduction to him) or a handful of dramatic roles (DOUBLE INDEMNITY, THE CAINE MUTINY, THE APARTMENT). Why is that? 

We don’t really know the answer but morlock moirafinnie tried to solve the mystery in her interview with Charles Tranberg, author of Fred MacMurray: A Biography, entitled “Small Town Boy Makes Good” -

http://moviemorlocks.com/2008/08/06/small-town-boy-makes-good/

Fred MacMurray, saxophone maniac

I also learned from my fellow morlocks just what a private individual MacMurray was in terms of the Hollywood social scene. He preferred to spend time with his family and on hobbies such as golf, gardening, music (he played the saxophone and was a bandleader at one time – he even had a pleasant singing voice), horseback riding, investing and leather making – which morlock RHSmith discovered in his blog “Fred MacMurray- Good at Stuff” http://moviemorlocks.com/2008/08/05/fred-macmurray-good-at-stuff/

 And here’s another detail that makes you love the guy. The night after he met his second wife, June Haver (his first wife, Lily, died in 1953), he showed up at her apartment the next day to fix the plumbling in her bathroom. What woman doesn’t love a fix-it kinda guy? Fred was a jack-of-all-trades, a genuine handyman, but never flashy or crude in his technique.

Fred as a cowboy

So as a  major player in this year’s “Summer Under the Stars” festival, the morlocks felt he was the one most worthy of a blog-a-thon because he’s clearly the most overlooked of the actors featured, especially when you put him up against such dynamic and colorful screen presences as Marlon Brando, Jack Palance, Peter Lorre or Richard Widmark. Fred tends to look a little drab and colorless in comparison. But look a little closer and you’ll see a real actor, one whose subtle approach to his craft has enabled him to completely inhabit characters as diverse as Arthur Russell in ALICE ADAMS (1935), Walter Neff in DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), Capt. Boll in FAIR WIND TO JAVA (1953), and Professor Ned Brainard in THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR (1961).  

Fred MacMurray in PUSHOVER

One of my favorite assessments of MacMurray was written by David Thomson in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film – “The ingredients of the MacMurray man are paradoxical but consistent: brittle cheerfulness; an anxious smile that subsides into slyness; a voice that tries to be jocular and easygoing but comes out fradulent; the semblance of a masculine carriage that turns insubstantial and shifty. In other words, MacMurray is a romantic lead built on quicksand, a hero compelled to betray, a lover likely to desert.” Of course, this isn’t the MacMurray of the Walt Disney comedies or the one who starred in seven Mitchell Leisen films including HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE, SWING HIGH, SWING LOW and REMEMBER THE NIGHT. No, Thomson is talking about the Fred MacMurray in THE APARTMENT, THE CAINE MUTINY, PUSHOVER and DOUBLE INDEMNITY, which are among my favorite Fred flicks. As Thomson notes, “Here are four memorable versions of a counterfeit nice guy in which the crispness of a new bank note turns sodden and limp once it is put down with spilt gin.”   

Pushover Spanish film poster

From most accounts I’ve read of MacMurray, however, he seemed to prefer the lightweight comedies and Disney family pictures he made. If you’ve been reading the other morlock posts on MacMurray, you already know from suzidoll’s article “Cooking the House,” how much he resisted being cast in Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY.

http://moviemorlocks.com/2008/08/04/crooking-the-house/

Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray in DOUBLE INDEMNITY

MacMurray recalled, “I held off saying I would do it, because in the first place, I wasn’t sure that I was able to, never having done anything like that type before. And then, also, I thought, people aren’t going to like me if I kill somebody’s husband.” (from Fred MacMurray: A Biography by Charles Tranberg) Of course, Wilder knew exactly what he was doing. “What Wilder saw,” according to Billy Wilder’s biographer Ed Sikov, “was MacMurray’s grinning, guy-next-door affability. He wasn’t glamorous and aristocratic. Or rugged. Or callow. What he was – purely, indistinguishably – was American. Fred MacMurray could play a glad-handing everyday salesman. In Billy’s mind at least, he would be perfect as a scheming killer on the make.”

Jack Lemmon (left) & MacMurray in THE APARTMENT

Wilder would come back to MacMurray many years later and once more beg him to play another unsympathetic character, Jeff Sheldrake, the outwardly respectable but devious executive of THE APARTMENT. Paul Douglas was originally cast in the role but when he died suddenly of a heart attack, Wilder was able to convince MacMurray to step in and play the scheming philander. MacMurray had just completed THE SHAGGY DOG for Disney and actually preferred that movie to this one where his character drove Shirley MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik to attempt suicide.

See Keelsetter’s post on it – http://moviemorlocks.com/2008/08/07/the-apartment/

MacMurray with Van Johnson & Robert Francis in THE CAINE MUTINY

Whereas Wilder saw MacMurray as the dark side of the guy-next-door, Stanley Kramer, producer of THE CAINE MUTINY, saw Fred as “a spectator in the scene of life, both in his work and in personal relations. He seemed strangely to have retired within himself.” Kramer’s observations, however, were most likely colored by Fred’s attempt to hide his deepest feelings and plunge himself into his work as a way of dealing with his wife’s death – she died just prior to production. The scene in which his conniving, cowardly character – Lt. Keefer – is confronted by a drunken Jose Ferrer still packs a punch. When Greenwald (Ferrer) throws his glass of champagne contemptously into Keefer’s face, we can feel MacMurray’s deep shame burning a hole in the screen. It’s a moment of total male humilation that is hard to forget. 

MacMurray with Van Johnson & Humphrey Bogart in THE CAINE MUTINY

Another great dramatic performance by MacMurray that isn’t as well known as the ones already mentioned is Douglas Sirk’s THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW (1956), which was highlighted in Moira’s interview with Tranberg. In the Sirk film, MacMurray plays a toy manufacturer whose home life with his wife and children seem empty and joyless – he barely seems to fit into their world or daily routines at all anymore and often feels as cold and empty as the mechanical robot he is currently developing. When he runs into a former girlfriend (Barbara Stanwyck again – they made a great team, didn’t they?) from his past, he feels a stirring of emotions that leads to a renewed friendship and then something much stronger…buy don’t expect a happy ending. Someone needs to put this out on DVD! 

Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray in Douglas Sirk's THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW

MacMurray was even convincing in period films and one that I fondly recall from childhood was MAID OF SALEM (1937) in which he starred opposite Claudette Colbert in a dramatization of the religious hysteria that engulfed Salem in 1692, resulting in the trial and execution of many people suspected of being witches. The film, which has frightening scenes of mob violence, recalls at times some of the more intense moments from Fritz Lang’s FURY (1936).  

Maid of Salem poster

But the dramatic actor is just one aspect of Fred MacMurray. He is loose and quirky in ways I’ve never seen before in HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE in which he plays a fun-loving, penniless playboy who falls for working girl Carole Lombard. And he’s an oasis of sanity in a sea of madness in the black comedy farce, MURDER, HE SAYS, which is in the Arsenic and Old Lace mode but works much better because Fred doesn’t frantically overact like Cary Grant did in the latter film. 

Fred MacMurray (center) & Marjorie Main on right

What I would give to see him in EXCLUSIVE (1937) opposite the dazzling but doomed Francis Farmer or with Bing Crosby as his brother in SING, YOU SINNERS (1938), or in the Barbara Stanwyck pairing that hardly anybody has seen – THE MOONLIGHTER (1953).

TCM will just have to select FRED MACMURRAY as a future “Star of the Month” – Programming, are you reading this? – but in the meantime, my personal picks for Fred’s 24-hour-film-tribute on Aug. 9th are SON OF FLUBBER (for nostalgia reasons), two offbeat westerns – GOOD DAY FOR A HANGING and FACE OF A FUGITIVE, THE APARTMENT, ALICE ADAMS and DIVE BOMBER (just to see him in a big budget Warner Bros. aerial drama with Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, Ralph Bellamy and Michael Curtiz at the helm). You can also see him in PUSHOVER -  a neglected film noir - on Kim Novak’s day – August 12th. And in October, when Carole Lombard is the “Star of the Month”, you can catch Fred in HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE and SWING HIGH, SWING LOW.  

Murder, He Says sheet music