Fred MacMurray

There are two ways you can remember Fred MacMurray, depending on where you saw him first. We were a Disney Channel family in the days when they were mostly stuff from the Vault (and weird stuff you couldn’t understand seeing there), and I’m also old enough to remember when Nick at Nite was exclusively in B&W but it was okay because they also played a lot of B&W shows in the middle of the day, too. That means that I grew up with Paternal Mode Fred MacMurray, and the other side of his career came as a great shock to me when I was an adult.

Actually, there were three versions of Fred MacMurray. He was born in Kankakee, Illinois, into a minor show business family. His father was a concert violinist and music teacher, and his aunt, Fay Holderness, was a vaudevillian who also made films with the likes of Laurel and Hardy and W. C. Fields. Young Fred played sax and sang for a couple of ‘20s- and ‘30s-era dance bands. He did some work as an extra, and when a band he was in was hired as background performers in a movie, he got his first screen role out of it. He was young, he was debonair, and he was a musician.

He liked playing against type; Double Indemnity likely appealed to him for that reason. He romanced quite a lot of famous women onscreen, from Paulette Goddard to Carole Lombard, from Irene Dunne to Katharine Hepburn. Even as the thoroughly despicable Jeff B. Sheldrake in The Apartment, there was something suave about him. He was one of the models for Captain Marvel. He was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and one of the highest-paid people in the country.

The year before he made The Apartment, he appeared in The Shaggy Dog. It marked a shift in his career. The Apartment wasn’t the last movie he was in made for adults, but it almost was. He made seven Disney movies of frankly varying quality. Despite his previous assertion that he was too lazy for television, he starred in 380 episodes of My Three Sons over twelve years. In four of his seven Disney movies, he was a father, albeit an imperfect one. In a fifth, he was an adoptive dad, not to mention a father figure for dozens to hundreds of boys over the course of several decades.

So yeah. I love Double Indemnity. The Caine Mutiny is really good. And there are a few other movies of that era that interest me, not least the one where he plays brothers with Bing Crosby and Donald O’Connor. Or the one where he’s a forest ranger. Or the one set in Port Townsend, WA, that eventually inspired the Ma and Pa Kettle series. But it doesn’t really matter how much I do or don’t like earlier MacMurray pictures, because I’ll still see him as Lem Siddons or Ned Brainard or Wilson Daniels. What do you do?