Second impressions
My first acquaintance with Fred MacMurray was as Steven Douglas, the laid-back, cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking father of My Three Sons. The Disney movies then consolidated his place in my heart. So it was with some alarm that I later discovered his earlier evil twin in Double Indemnity, and the terrible louse in The Apartment. I wanted to write to the casting directors to say, What the… What have you done to my Fred?
It took me a while to put the pieces back into place on the timeline, and recover from so cruel a shattering of my illusions – sustained only by my careful 12-year-old’s reasoning that it must have been the love of a good woman that brought Steve Douglas back from a life of creepdom.
I’ve had the same experience with a slew of actors, having seen them first during their decline on the small screen – never suspecting they had once been lions and, some, not always hacks mugging their way through tissue-thin plots. Ruth Gordon, Robert Blake, Jackie Coogan, Agnes Moorehead, Buddy Ebsen, Eric Estrada (just kidding), Carroll O’Connor: who knew?
So he worked with Bogart, Cagney, Capra, Preston Sturges… William Demarest will forever be Uncle Charley to me.
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- HA – you got me with Erik Estrada =)
Agnes Moorehead in the “Magnificent Ambersons” (she played Fanny) threw me for a loop when I viewed it, after years of “Bewitched” watching!
— roggey Jan 14, 6:30pm # - Weirder still than seeing them in their youth or dotage on-screen is seeing them in real life.
The father of those two plump girls who wore their blonde hair in pony tails in a continuous state of almost falling out, the girls who never put their heels into their shoes, so that all their shoes were flat in the back and flapped like slippers, those little slobby pig-girls whose blouses were only half tucked in, who looked like they slept in their clothes…
Their father, who parked his white Rolls in the red zone in front of the school on his frequent trips to torment the principal was supposed to be someone famous. Burt Lancaster. And every time I see him in a movie, no matter how cool or heroic or sexy or tough, I just can’t forget those shockingly sloppy girls of his.
Edward G. Robinson standing there at the country club buffet, plate in hand, civilized as could be, chatting with some other old man, no gun in sight.
The stunning and brittle Mrs. Robinson of film, Anne Bancroft, showing up at the dentist’s office in sweats to pick up her kid.
Clint Eastwood standing at the deli counter in Whole Foods.
It’s like they’re from some other mythical land, and it’s creepy when they violate that fourth wall and step into my reality as ordinary mortals.
— wizmo Jan 14, 6:41pm # - Its amazing how ‘frames of reference’ change for different people viewing things at different times. My son, upon seeing Julie Roberts in a movie at a cinema, remarked “Hey, there’s Chandler’s girlfriend” – having not gone through the entire “Mystic Pizza”/”Pretty Woman” thing, he knew her only from a one-episode guest spot on “Friends”...
— Jerry Jan 15, 2:30pm # - For me, the greatest shock was the POW that I grew up with…Bob Crane. How creepy. I had dreams about that for years. To have to move celebtities from the safety of 2 dimensions into freeky reality is a jolt and I must say a bit of a sad coming-of-age.
— cshoppell Jan 19, 6:22pm #
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