Jim Class

 

Contemporary moviegoers will recognize James Garner from his roles in (left)
"Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" (2002), with Sandra Bullock, and (right)
"The Notebook" (2004), wih Gena Rowlands.

"James Garner, a master of light comedy who won an Emmy as Rockford and earlier had shot to fame as a charming and dry-witted gambler on the hit TV western ‘Maverick,’ died Saturday (July 19, 2014) at his Los Angeles home. He was 86.”

- Los Angeles Times, reported by Dennis McLellan

 

Doris Day and James Garner pose in "Move Over, Darling" (1963).

In show business parlance, he was a “light leading man,” in the company of other light leading men in the 1950s and ‘60s with first names that were clipped, even craggy – solid-resonating names like Rock (Hudson), Cliff (Robertson), Rod (Taylor)  – men with chiseled jaws, immaculate haircuts, and broad shoulders. James Garner, who had already established his wry, laidback persona as TV’s first antihero, “Maverick,” a roving gambler in the Old West who would sooner flimflam his antagonists than draw a gun on them, found himself cast as cynical, self-effacing types in a string of romantic comedies, among them “Cash McCall” (1959), “Boys’ Night Out” (1962), “Move Over, Darling” (1963), “The Thrill of It All” (1963), and “The Wheeler Dealers” (1963).

 

Lee Remick and James Garner clown around for a
publcity photo for "The Wheeler Dealers" (1963).

His leading ladies included Kim Novak, Doris Day, Lee Remick, and Natalie Wood, the latter whom recommended, “Jim, now that you’ve established yourself, you need to take some acting classes.” Garner, whose series, “Maverick,” had surpassed rivals Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen in the Sunday evening ratings, replied, “Why would I want to do that? I’ve got the top show on television. If and when things start to go south, I’ll consider taking lessons, but until then I don’t want to mess with a good thing.”

Never fond of the pretensions of the acting profession, he often mentioned Spencer Tracy as his inspiration. He noted in his 2011 memoir, The Garner Files, “I’m from the Spencer Tracy school: Be on time, know your words, hit your marks, and tell the truth.” He didn’t have any “theories” about acting “except that an actor shouldn’t take himself too seriously…Acting is just common sense. It isn’t hard if you put yourself aside and just do what the writer wrote.”

 

James Garner watches Henry Fonda in "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial."

Garner would also mention Henry Fonda as a mentor. Garner made his acting debut in a 1954 Broadway production of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” directed by Charles Laughton and starring Fonda as Lt. Keefer (the role played by Fred MacMurray in the motion picture “The Caine Mutiny”). Garner, who had no lines, watched Fonda night after night: “I learned practically all my acting style from him.”

In his autobiography, he wrote, “I have to laugh when I hear actors talking about their art. Hey, it’s a movie. Just say the lines.”  In a 1984 interview, he told The New York Times, “I was never enamored of the business, never even wanted to be an actor, really. It’s always been a means to an end, which is to make a living.”

In The New York Times obituary, Bruce Weber wrote, “He was a genuine star but as an actor something of a paradox: a lantern-jawed, brawny athlete whose physical appeal was both enhanced and undercut by a disarming wit.” That disarming wit, along with a charming reluctance for rash heroics, served Garner well on “Maverick,” from 1957 until he left the series over a legal dispute in 1962.

 

Margot Kidder costarred as a barmaid and James Garner's love interest in the
shortlived TV series "Nichols," which also featured Stuart Margolin as Garner's
deputy. Margolin later played Garner's shifty pal "Angel" on "The Rockford Files."

In 1971, James Garner returned to series television as the star of “Nichols,” portraying a sheriff in an Arizona town who, like Maverick, is opposed to gunplay, relying on his wits to overcome adversity, all the while hatching schemes to get rich quick with a minimum of effort.  Garner called his character “a free spirit and an independent thinker struggling to keep up with a fast-changing world.” The series is set in 1914, and instead of a horse, the sheriff straddles a belt-drive Harley-Davidson. “We slipped in a little commentary here and there…antiviolence, pro-civil rights, and pro-women’s rights,” Garner recalled in his memoir, “but we kept it gentle and never got preachy. And always tried to keep it funny.” Disappointed sponsors anticipated a carbon copy of “Maverick,” and the series, retitled “James Garner as Nichols,” was ultimately canceled after a mere two dozen episodes. “I was so angry and disappointed,” Garner wrote, “I decided to kill Nichols off in the last episode.”

Garner reprised the role of Bret Maverick in the 1978 TV-movie pilot “The New Maverick,” introducing actor Charles Frank (best known for his recurring role as Dr. Jeff Martin on the daytime drama “All My Children”) as a Maverick nephew or cousin or something. The subsequent series, “Young Maverick,” lasted a single season in 1979.

In 1981, Garner’s production company, Cherokee Productions, hooked up with Warner Bros. Television (Garner’s legal nemesis from his “Maverick” days) for the shortlived series “Bret Maverick,” which was canceled after one season. When Mel Gibson starred in the 1994 big-screen reboot of “Maverick,” Garner played a frontier marshal named Zane Cooper (perhaps as an homage to prolific sagebrush writer Zane Grey and “High Noon Star” Gary Cooper) who is revealed to be Bret Maverick’s father.

 

Washington Post critic Tom Shales observed that Garner
"embodied the crusty,sardonic and self-effacing strain
of American masculinity" as Maverick and Rockford.

From 1974 to 1980, James Garner played his most endearing character, Jim Rockford, a pardoned ex-convict and self-described “chicken” trying to eke out a living in Los Angeles as a perennially broke private investigator who “got beat up a minimum of twice per show.” Garner told a Variety interviewer in 2005 that Rockford is “not a hell of a lot different from Maverick. They’re antiheroes, both of them, and for an actor, that’s probably the most fun kind of leading man to play.”

Because of physical ailments (bad knees and back trouble, doubtlessly aggravated by his insistence on performing his own stunts) – and an ugly legal quarrel over the show’s actual profits - Garner eventually decided to not continue the series, and CBS canceled “The Rockford Files” midway through its sixth season in 1980. It would take 14 years before Garner’s Rockford made a comeback on television, from 1994 to 1999, in eight reunion movies on NBC, opposite such leading ladies as Rita Moreno, Dyan Cannon, Joanna Cassidy, and Kathryn Harrold.

The New York Times’ Bruce Weber said Garner “was most at home as an iconoclast, a flawed or unlikely hero.” According to the Los Angeles Times, “Garner’s seemingly effortless flair for delivering humorous dialogue - and delivering straight dialogue humorously – made him one of television’s biggest stars.” When a studio executive suggested Garner tone down “Rockford’s” humor during the series’ original run, the actor said, “Humor is what I do best. That’s what people hire me for…either fire me or don’t mess with it.”

There was a less humorous side to James Garner. He admitted in his memoir, “I’m a pessimist by nature…I’m really an old curmudgeon.” His longtime assistant, MaryAnn Rea insisted he was a “curmudgeon wannabe.” Garner wrote, “We argue about it.”

 

James Garner stars in "Darby's Rangers" (1958).

Occasionally, James Garner had the opportunity to stretch his acting chops in meatier dramatic roles. As a matter of fact, his first starring role was in “Darby’s Rangers” (1958), a World War II action flick based on the first elite commando unit of the Army Rangers. Garner lucked into the part after the studio refused to give the originally cast star, Charlton Heston, a percentage of the profits. (In his memoir, Garner dismissed Heston as a “stiff as a board” actor.)

 

Off-camera, the stars of "The Great Escape" (1963), James Coburn, James Garner,
and Steve McQueen, relax with director John Sturges.

Garner exhibited a determinedly grave presence in the ensemble casts of 1963’s “The Great Escape” (with Steve MecQueen, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, and James Coburn) and 1966’s “Grand Prix” (with Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune, Brian Bedford, and Antonio Sabato), but what we’re interested in the Moviehouse is a handful of films that explored the dark side of Hollywood’s light leading man when the goings got grim. So dim the lights in the Moviehouse…

 

James Garner, Howard Morris, Tony Randall, Howard Duff in "Boys' Night Out"

After his departure from “Maverick,” James Garner was filming the 1962 love nest romp “Boys’ Night Out” (costarring Kim Novak, Tony Randall, Howard Duff, and Howard Morris) when he was interviewed by Cosmopolitan magazine’s John Whitcomb, who asked him if he was out of the saddle for good. Garner replied, “You couldn’t get me back with a crane.” Despite protests that he was finished with westerns, he found himself back in the saddle for the first time since “Maverick” in the 1966 film “Duel at Diablo,” produced and directed by Ralph Nelson.

When he was 15 years old, Long Island-born Ralph Nelson won a New York Times oratory contest and was singled out by a judge as “potentially the most dangerous juvenile criminal” in the metropolis for his participation in a string of gang fights, When his next birthday rolled around he had been jailed in a dozen states for vagrancy and suspicion of burglary.

 

(Left) Jack Palance and Keenan Wynn in the "Playhouse 90" production of "Requiem
for a Heavyweight"; (right) Anthony Quinn and Jackie Gleason in the motion picture
"Requiem for a Heavyweight" - both directed by Ralph Nelson

As an ”innovative and widely celebrated director,” in the words of Burt A. Folkart in the Los Angeles Times, Nelson “honed his professional abilities in television’s glorious and growing days of live performances.” The New York Times’ Ronald Sullivan noted, “Mr. Nelson was widely credited with bringing consistently strong and innovative direction to live dramatic programming in the early years of television.” He directed more than 1000 dramatic shows for TV. The 1956 CBS production of “Requiem for a Heavyweight” on CBS’s “Playhouse 90” won Emmy Awards for director Nelson, writer Rod Serling, and star Jack Palance. Six years later, Nelson directed the acclaimed screen version of “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” starring Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason, Mickey Rooney, and Julie Harris.

In 1963, Ralph Nelson directed Sidney Poitier in an Oscar-winning performance as an itinerant handyman reluctantly persuaded by a group of German immigrant nuns to build a chapel for the poor in the Arizona desert in “Lilies of the Field.” Three years later, Nelson cast Poitier in “something a little bit different than ‘Lilies of the Field,’” in the director’s words, as a former buffalo soldier-turned-gambler hired by the Army to break horses in “Duel at Diablo.”

 

James Garner as straight-arrow scout Jess Remsberg in "Duel at Diablo" (1966)

The story in “Duel at Diablo” is a familiar one for western fans – a cavalry unit of raw recruits transports wagons of ammunition and supplies to a fort through hostile Apache territory – but Nelson succeeds in making the familiar fresh with an array of complex characterizations. Alongside Poitier, James Garner portrays a world-weary frontier scout who also happens to be searching for the white man who murdered and scalped his Indian wife. Stockholm-born Bibi Andersson, a favorite actress of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s, made a rare American appearance as a woman ostracized by townsfolk after being rescued from Indian captivity.

 

Dennis Weaver, Bill Travers, Sidney Poitier, James Garner in "Duel at Diablo"

Rounding out the cast are Dennis Weaver (best known as the star of the 1970s police series “McCloud”), as Andersson’s husband, a self-centered and hateful tradesman who denounces his wife for not killing herself when she was abducted by the Apache, and Bill Travers (best known for his starring role, with real-life wife Virginia McKenna, in “Born Free”), as Scotland-born Lt. “Scotty” McAllister, a by-the-book rank officer with dreams of becoming a general.

No Bret Maverick he, Garner’s no-nonsense westerner, Jess Remsberg, is as rough-hewn and weather-beaten as the movie’s striking Utah landscapes. His soulful eyes reflect the film’s pervasive air of fatalism and almost Shakespearean tragedy, not to mention graphic bloodshed. There’s a marvelous moment when Jess sadly watches the beleaguered troop ride into the night on a desperate mission to distract the Apache, led by a battered and wounded Scotty, who quotes from Scottish poet Robert Burns’ patriotic song “Scots Who Have (with Wallace bled)”: “Welcome to your gory bed / Or to victory.” The movie boasts an attention-getting music score – rife with guitars, trumpets, and drums – by Neal Hefti, a jazz trumpeter who played with big band leader Woody Herman.

In his memoir, James Garner recalled, “I loved working with Sidney and my old pal Dennis Weaver. Everybody did stunts in that picture, even…Bibi Andersson. Sidney had to learn to ride – he didn’t know anything about horses and I think he was a little afraid of them.” (As a matter of fact, Poitier made only one other western, 1972’s “Buck and the Preacher,” which he also directed, costarring Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee.)

 

Between takes, "Duel at Diablo" costars Sidney Poitier
and Bibi Andersson hone their shooting skills.

Director Ralph Nelson, who often appeared in his pictures (credited as “Alf Elson”), has a cameo in “Duel at Diablo” as a colonel who leads the cavalry rescue at the end and forces the Apache to surrender and return to their reservation. When one character wonders if the Apache will stay on the reservation, Garner’s scout bitterly intones, “Why should they?” underscoring the filmmaker’s depiction of Native Americans as victims of prejudice and racism. Noticeably, no issue is raised in the script over Poitier’s presence.

Nelson returned to the subject matter – with even more graphic violence – in 1970’s “Soldier Blue,” with Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss witnessing the wholesale rape and slaughter of a Cheyenne village by the Army, obviously mirroring the My Lai Massacre of hundreds of South Vietnamese villagers by the U.S. Army in 1968. Nelson personally yanked “Soldier Blue” from theaters in Australia to protest what censors there had removed.

Nelson revisited his gentler side when he elicited an Academy Award-winning performance from Cliff Robertson in “Charly” (1968).  When he made “Lilies of the Field,” he agreed to a budget of $250,000. Ralph Nelson’s last directing credit was the 1979 made-for-television sequel “Chirstmas Lilies of the Field” (budgeted at $1.6 million), with Billy Dee Williams in the Sidney Poitier role.

In The New York Times review of “Duel at Diablo,” critic Robert Alden pointed out that Garner’s “tiredness with the pointless struggle is evident in every line of his weather-beaten face.” Well, as much as the actor’s eyes conveyed a weariness with the world in “Duel at Diablo,” his portrayal of Wyatt Earp in the following year’s “Hour of the Gun” was, in his own words, “the most steely-eyed of all my roles.”

 

Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas), Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster), Virgil Earp (John
Hudson), Morgan Earp (DeForest Kelley) in "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" (1957)

In 1957, director John Sturges made “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” a very popular but highly fictionalized account of the events leading up to Western folklore’s most legendary showdown, starring Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. A decade later, when Sturges wanted to reunite the original cast in a sequel - originally called “Tombstone” (later the title of the 1993 western with Kurt Russell as Earp and Val Kilmer as Holliday) - the studio, United Artists, desiring to distinguish the new film from its Paramount Pictures predecessor, demanded different actors. “Hour of the Gun” was filmed on a number of Mexican locations, including the small village of Torreon, which doubled as Tombstone, Arizona.

Morgan Earp (Sam Melville), Virgil Earp (Frank Converse), Doc Holliday
(Jason Robards), Wyatt Earp (James Garner) make their way to the O.K. Corral
in "Hour of the Gun" (1967).

James Garner, who had previously worked with Sturges on the 1963 box-office hit “The Great Escape,” recalled, “My agent called and said Sturges was doing a sequel to ‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral’ and I agreed to do it without seeing the script. I trusted John that much. It’s a different kind of western than I’d done.”

Historically, the 30-second shootout between the Earp brothers – Virgil, Wyatt, Morgan – with Doc Holliday, and cowboys Ike Clanton, Billy Clanton, Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and “Billy the Kid” Claiborne resulted in the shooting deaths of the McLaury brothers and Billy Clanton, while Ike and Claibrone ducked for cover. In the aftermath, Virgil Earp was crippled by shotgun blasts in an ambush, and Morgan Earp was assassinated in a billiard parlor. Riding with a posse that included Doc Holliday and kid brother Warren Earp, Wyatt took the law into his own hands in a relentless vendetta that resulted in the deaths of four desperados.

James Garner and Jason Robards in a publicity photo for "Hour of the Gun"

In an understatement, Garner commented, “The movie is about Earp’s obsession with revenge.” Garner’s “steely-eyed,” uncompromising bloodlust is effectively countered by the fatalistic cynicism of Jason Robard’s Doc Holliday: “If your going to kill like me, you might as well drink like me!” (Like so many earlier depictions of the Georgia-born dentist-turned-gambler-gunfighter, Robards characterized the tubercular Doc Holliday – who died at 36 – as a middle-aged, salt-and-pepper-haired sardonic sage of the Old West.) Garner later remarked, “Great cast…Jason was a terrific actor and a good guy, but he was never on the set when you needed him. Fortunately, Sturges always knew where to find him, because Torreon had only one bar and one whorehouse.”

 

In The Garner Files, James Garner remembered, "When Jason didn't show up
for an 8:00 a.m. call until late that afternoon, Sturges (above) dressed him down
in front of the entire crew. Jason was contrite and his behavior improved after that."

Roger Ebert proclaimed, “Garner turns in one of his best performances. Sturges must have tamed him. He doesn’t shout or swagger; he’s quiet and squint-eyed, and in 20 more years when he works up some wrinkles he’ll make a good, indestructible cowboy.”

James Garner as Wyatt Earp, Bruce Willis as Tom Mix in "Sunset" (1988)

(Coincidentally, a little over 20 years later, Garner reprised his portrayal of Wyatt Earp in “Sunset,” a 1988 action comedy written and directed by Blake Edwards that finds the aging former lawman teaming up with silent screen cowboy star Tom Mix to solve a murder mystery in 1920s Hollywood. In reality, Mix served as one of Earp's pallbearers at his funeral. According to Garner, Bruce Willis, as Tom Mix, “ad-libbed all through the picture. At one point, I took him aside and gave him some friendly advice: ‘No matter what you think, you’re not a better writer than Blake Edwards.’ He didn’t listen. He just wasn’t serious about the work.”)

At a time when violent, amoral, nihilistic Italian spaghetti westerns were changing American audiences’ perceptions of their homegrown genre, and so influencing American filmmakers’ revisionist takes on our frontier history, Roger Ebert praised “Hour of the Gun” as a “Hollywood Western” that “remains blessedly itself.”

James Garner and Clint Eastwood in a 1959 episode of "Maverick"; forty-one
years later, they reunited in "Space Cowboys"

In the mid-1960s, a TV western pardner of James Garner, Clint Eastwood, who played cattle drive ramrod Rowdy Yates on the CBS series “Rawhide,” drifted overseas to star in a trio of groundbreaking spaghetti westerns for legendary director Sergio Leone - “A Fistful of Dollars,” “”For a Few Dollars More,” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” – opening the floodgates for other American actors to appear in Italian westerns, including Chuck Connors (star of television’s “The Rifleman”), Guy Madison (best known from TV’s “The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok”), and Edd Byrnes (from the popular late 1950s series “77 Sunset Strip”). Lee Van Cleef, for decades a familiar face as a bad guy in countless westerns on the small screen and in motion pictures (he made an indelible screen debut when his hawk-like visage was the first image seen in the classic 1952 Gary Cooper western “High Noon”), found late-blooming success in middle age, after costarring roles in “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” as an unlikely box-office hit in several spaghetti westerns.

James Garner looks lean and mean in "A Man Called Sledge" (1970)...
It's in the script, but it's highly doubtful anyone in the Old West uttered
the epithet, "Wise ass!"

Whether James Garner wanted to further stretch his acting chops or whether he was looking forward to a transatlantic vacation in Almeria, Spain (a location popular in numerous spaghetti westerns), he remained reticent about exactly why he played against type as an amoral, sadistic outlaw in 1970’s “A Man Called Sledge," produced by fabled Naples-born movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis (who grew up as a youth selling his father’s spaghetti and later contributed to filmdom lexicon with his immortal phrase, “When Jaws die, nobody cry - when Kong die, everybody cry”). In his autobiography, Garner admitted, “I wish I could remember why I let Dino De Laurentiis talk me into this turkey.”

Claude Akins, Dennis Weaver, James Garner in "A Man Called Sledge"

It was “one of the few times I’ve played a heavy,” Garner recalled, “and one of the last.” As the ruthless leader of a gang outlaws – including Garner’s “Duel at Diablo” costar Dennis Weaver and Claude Akins (best known for his portrayal of Sheriff Lobo in the series “B.J. and the Bear” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”) – he masterminds an improbable robbery of $300,000 in gold dust from a heavily guarded prison. One internet wag was prompted to remark, “Who would have thought that McCloud, Sheriff Lobo and Bret Maverick would ever team up and pull a heist?” Also along for the ride are Wayde Preston, star of the 1950s western series “Colt .45,” and Tony Young, who guest-starred on several TV westerns, including “Maverick.”

Behind the scenes, Laura Antonelli goofs around with
"A Man Called Sledge" costar James Garner.

Sultry Italian actress Laura Antonelli plays the incongruous love interest for the surly Garner, a prostitute who insists they don’t need gold for happiness. John Marley (familiar to fans of “The Godfather” as the obstinate Hollywood mogul who finds the severed head of his prized horse in his bed) wins the Gabby Hayes-Walter Brennan Award for Most Embarrassing Scene-Stealing by a Grizzled Coot.

John Marley as "Old Man" in "A Man Called Sledge": "Gold gives
off a scent. It's like an animal or a man. Paper money don't throw
off a scent. Paper money don't whisper to you like gold does."

The dour western, rife with heavy-handed clichés about no-honor-among-thieves, was directed by actor Vic Morrow, best known as the sullen Sgt. Saunders on the gritty World War II series “Combat!” Morrow co-wrote the screenplay for “A Man Called Sledge” with Frank Kowalski, a script supervisor and dialogue director on “Combat!” Kowalski also worked with director Sam Peckinpah as a script supervisor on “The Ballad of Cable Hogue,” “Junior Bonner,” and “The Killer Elite,” as well as writing the story for Peckinpah’s “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.”

Vic Morrow as Sgt. "Chip" Saunders in "Combat!"

Morrow directed a number of “Combat!” episodes. Unfounded rumors say he was fired during production of “A Man Called Sledge” and replaced by a hack director of spaghetti westerns. As an actor in several television and film dramas, Morrow always seemed to project an aura of bleak fatalism, from his first role as a juvenile delinquent in “Blackboard Jungle” (1956) to his final role as an angry bigot in “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983). Writing about Morrow as an antihero in “Combat!” pop culture observer Gene Santoro noted, “At times, you can see the tombstones in his eyes.” Not surprisingly, a sense of nihilism pervades “A Man Called Sledge,” as greed destroys the band of thieves until only Garner remains, “bitter and disappointed,” in the words of critic Tony Mastroianni in The Cleveland Press, “just like the audience.”

An especially bad memory from "A Man Called Sledge" is the

film's inappropriately jazzy music score, including an annoyingly

recurring folksy ballad about the curse of "other men's gold,"

written by Irish musician Phil Coulter and Scottish songwriter

Bill Martin, the same songwriting team that gave us the

bubblegum pop hit "Saturday Night" by the Bay City Rollers.

Remembering “A Man Called Sledge,” James Garner commented, “The poster says, ‘Not suitable for children.’ It should say, ‘Not suitable for human consumption.”