A time of unity, and mockery (The Thanksgiving Ritual)

It’s a time of division in our country. The recent election illustrated quite clearly how this country is moving along on parallel tracks, some people steadfastly believing in one party’s divinity while others believe in the other party’s “correct” stance. The U.S. is a nation locked in conflict, with people looking for answers. They want them so much they follow terrible leaders down miserable paths (the only ones we’re allowed, Coke and Pepsi) and are either heartened or demolished when their chosen demi-deity is either triumphant or vanquished.

What can be done about this? Well, one can keep true to the one true faith: American mockery. 

Robert Vaughn is disgusted by what he sees.

The kind of mockery that could be found when people volunteered to hold balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade dressed as clowns. The kind of mockery that ensnared one of the most dead-serious actors ever, Mr. Robert Vaughn. 

Skeptical but
undaunted.

I invite you to rewatch the moment when Mr. Vaughn, a Most Serious Thespian, read the preamble to the Constitution and was mocked by people dressed as clowns. 

Look seriously at the man from U.N.C.L.E. (stroking your chin), wiggle your nose at him, or just carry a balloon that says “Hi Mom!” But for the sake of sanity in the country, mock the serious man reading the Constitution. 

That way, things will all be all right. (And, to quote Tom Lehrer, we will all go together when we go.) 

Gifts my mother gave me

My mother in
Ireland. Not a great 
photo of her, but one
she loved.

My mother was a square. That’s not a nice way to start a tribute to a parent who recently departed (on Aug. 29, at 85 years of age), but when I decided to write about the tastes that my mother passed on to me (as I did with my father eight years ago), I came up against the fact that, in the rock ’n’ roll era that she grew up in, my mother was generally into “square” music, meaning popular standards (called more grandiosely “The Great American Songbook”) as opposed to rhythm and blues and its flashier stepchild, rock ’n’ roll. 

But there was a greater beauty in the stuff that my mother enjoyed. I only understood it from my 30s onward, when I began to actively listen to the popular standards my mother loved and delve into the different singing styles, and the exquisiteness of some of the songs. You see, my mother was lucky in that she always wanted to be a wife and mother (this was a part of her Eisenhower-era Catholic training) and so, she was blessed to raise me and my sister for a bunch of years at home before she did have to go back into the workplace (the late Seventies were difficult for everybody). 

And while my father led me to the golden age of movie comedy, comics, pulp thrillers, and most importantly, foreign film, my mother did have more staid taste. That said, I did pick up some cultural items from her that have stayed with me lo the many years. I’ll start off with a few movie/TV things (because generally that was my dad’s area for cool-stuff indoctrination) and then tackle the whole musical issue.

Champagne for Caesar (1950). My mother did like certain kinds of screwball comedies — not the rowdier ones, but movies that were cleverly scripted. In this regard, she turned me on to this light comedy that tackles the TV quiz show world just as it was taking off.

It’s a smart little satire of these shows and also their viewers. It features Vincent Price in a great role (one of his own personal faves), as the quirky owner of a soap company that Ronald Coleman is trying to bankrupt via the game show that the company sponsors, called “Masquerade for Money.” The smart casting extends all the way down to the pet that the film is named after, an alcoholic parrot named “Caesar.” (Voice courtesy of the inimitable Mel Blanc.) 

 

Ah, the mysteries! My mother also loved carefully plotted Christie-type whodunits. She never read ol’ Agatha (in the second half of her life, she became addicted to the work of Mary Higgins Clark, though), but she, along with her brother, my Uncle Neil, was a definite fan of the clever-detective-unlocks-the-“perfect murder” type of murder mystery. (Her absolute fave of these was Rene Clair’s And Then There Were None, 1945.) 

Her primo fascination in this regard as far as TV detectives went was the best of the bunch, hands down — that being Lt. Columbo of the LAPD. The show was indeed the best-written mystery show on the air for two reasons: The first was the fact that its creators, Levinson and Link, decided to invert the murder-mystery formula and let the viewer see who the killer was — the mystery then became how Columbo could figure out the culprit and apprehend them. (The fact that he would often entrap them with what seemed like flimsy circumstantial evidence didn’t matter, as the killer would usually have a flip-out when accused and could then be arrested; the matter of whether these cases would hold up in a court of law was beyond the purview of the show.) 

The second reason that the show (which wasn’t a regular weekly series; it was instead a sequence of TV movies with some great haughty murderers) remains so indelible is, of course, because of Peter Falk’s timeless and brilliant performance as the Lieutenant. Blending a deceptively sloppy facade with a razor-sharp mind, in every good episode (there were only a few real clinkers — most of those came in the ABC reboot from the ’90s) Columbo constantly surprised the killer by figuring out their “perfect crime” and proving that ratiocination (the ultimate Holmesian phrase!) didn’t need to be exercised while wearing an attention-getting mustache or a deerstalker cap. 

 

And my mother truly got me into Hollywood musicals. While my father steered me toward the Marx Bros, Laurel and Hardy, and W.C. Fields, as well as more serious films by Orson Welles and Jean Cocteau, my mother did prefer a happy ending. Thus, her love of MGM musicals (most decidedly of the Arthur Freed unit vintage — and the “A” titles, not those “B” musicals).

She had two heroines as a girl: Margaret O’Brien and Esther Williams. (One identifiable for a kid; the other aspirational for a girl going to the pool in Astoria Park.) Her all-time favorite MGM title was their Little Women (1949), but aside from that one dramatic foray into Alcott-land, she primarily watched and rewatched the musicals starring Gene, Judy, Fred, and Debbie. 

The best among those is arguably Singin’ in the Rain, which remains fresh and lively every time it is viewed, and also sported some crazy-ass colors in the “Broadway ballet” that featured athletic and acrobatic Mr. Kelly and the sensuous and slinky Ms. Charisse.

The film was often seen on TV, but for the moviegoing experience, nothing was as impressive as seeing musicals at the now defunct Ziegfeld Theater, where That’s Entertainment (1974) premiered and which later had programs of classic MGM titles. As was the case with Disney movies (which I never got hooked on — sorry, Ma!), my mother brought us to these screenings in the hopes that we would like what we saw, but also to rewatch the films that she had loved from her childhood and teen years. 

As a teen my mother really loved Eddie Fisher. Yes, the same Eddie who is mostly known to show-biz fans for leaving Debbie and wedding Liz, only to have Liz publicly humiliate him with Burton the way he had humiliated her with Debbie. (Later in the Sixties he married Connie Stevens but there wasn’t much humiliation [that we know of] in that relationship, so it’s not much talked about.) 

My mother was a member of the Eddie Fisher fan club, Astoria, Queens, division. She described the meetings to me once — there was another teen girl in Astoria who loved Eddie, too, so they sat around and talked about him and played his records. But they were given “official” status!

Oddly enough, my mother didn’t have any LPs of her favorites saved from her child/teen years. But she did have some 45s, and one of them was this “Italianate” tune from 1954 that sounds moderately operetta-ish and significantly from the school of fake Italian songs that gave us “Come On-a My House.” (My mother also loved Rosie.)

The songwriters of this opus were Bennie Benjamin (a Black songwriter who gave us both “Wheel of Fortune” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”), George Weiss (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” “What a Wonderful World”), and Al Bandini (a jazz trumpet player). The song is not one of Fisher’s greatest hits, but it kinda mesmerized me as a kid, since it seemed like a gibberish tune back then (I loved novelty tunes and still do), but catchy. Now I’m grown up and it’s still gibberish and just as catchy.

 

The big discovery for me as a kid, though, was my mother’s love of Nat King Cole. The odd thing was, again, that she had just one surviving single of his (I’ll get to that), and I was first hearing his songs via an album of Jerry Vale’s that my mother loved where he covered Nat’s hits. (Yes, this is a very “square” way to find out about Nat.)

But my uncle had extra pristine-condition LPs at his house and ended up gifting my mother with a greatest hits record by Nat that had a number of his romantic ballads. I didn’t really wanna hear them all the time as a kid because… well, I was a kid. But they got into my subconscious and, as of my 30s, I did realize how singular and beautiful Nat’s ballads were. They remain so, and always will be.

This song is from 1952 and was written by Jimmy Van Heusen (a regular supplier of great fare for Sinatra) and Sammy Gallop (“Wake the Town and Tell the People”).

 

The interesting part about my mother’s love for Nat’s music is that the one 45 she had of his was this one, which is one of the times that Nat tackled rhythm and blues. Thus, this was one of the rockin’-est singles my mother had in her possession. (I enjoyed the Crewcuts “Sh-Boom,” but I had no idea that was a whitebread cover that just kept the hook and got rid of the soul.)

The song was released in 1957 and was written by Ollie Jones (a member of the doo-wop group the Cues, who backed up Nat on various tracks). 

 

My father passed on to me a fascination for radio as a medium, since he was of the generation that thrived on the theater of the mind that is now quaintly called “old time radio” (although they still have radio comedy and dramas over in the U.K.). My mother was of the TV generation, and while she had dim memories of some of the major radio shows of the Forties, she had major reminiscences about her and her brothers rewatching “the Million Dollar Movie” (which aired one movie every day for a week, twice a day).

She therefore was more familiar with radio as a medium for deejays playing music. And one of the most velvet-voiced of that breed, in NYC at least, was the late, great William B. Williams. Willie B. hated playing anything that wasn’t the Great American Songbook, but WNEW-AM played MOR “soft rock” for more than a decade — and that’s when I got into listening to it, to hear the new songs and also the patter by the deejays (Klavan in the Morning, Willie B., Julie LaRosa, Ted Brown, Jim Lowe, what a bunch!).

My mother felt Willie B. was the best of the group, thus this aircheck from around the time we had it playing around the house. It sounds just like AM radio, since it goes in and out at points. And though Willie got to play his beloved American popular standards, you’ll notice that he also plays Linda Ronstadt (in her soft-rock heyday), Carly Simon, and the Association’s “Windy.” (One of the interesting things was that WNEW was still playing Sixties hits in the Seventies.) This is a joy to hear, for those who used to listen to Willie B.

 

I move from the radio to the music it played, and the music my mother played around the house. Her album collection contained no old LPs from the Fifties, but it did contain original cast albums of Broadway shows. And so I was “drilled” on this music by her playing it on record. Once I hit upon the kind of rock I wanted to hear (which did move back and forth from singer-songwriter stuff to “new wave” and back again), I said goodbye to the popular standards. 

But in the Nineties, people were unloading their albums like crazy. A store I used to shop at (which was directly across from my dotcom office at the time) had what seemed like the full discography of Sinatra LPs going for 50 cents to 3 dollars a pop. I ended up buying all of them and then (while retaining my love of singer-songwriters and certain bands very much) falling down the rabbit hole of American popular standards. 

At various points, I realized I was now listening to “my parents’ music.” But I didn’t care because the songs were so fuckin’ beautiful. (Really, when you’re into Tom Waits, how can you not go back and listen to Sinatra’s “suicide” albums?) I credit my mother for this part of my musical taste, since she was so entrenched in that area.

And I turn here to a singer she didn’t particularly care for, but who does here a simply perfect rendition of a song that I’m sure I heard first from her record collection. You see, she had this original cast album for a show called “All-American” that flopped on B’way in 1962. The show is notable for two things: its lovely score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (Bye Bye Byrdie), and for the fact that it was the only B’way show to ever have an original libretto by Mel Brooks.

Duke Ellington thought the score so good that he released an album of his versions of the tunes. And vocalists began to record the beautiful “Once Upon a Time.” Sinatra did a very solid version of it, but I prefer this particular version by Bobby Darin because there is a palpable sadness and yearning in his voice.

It could be attributable to the fact that his marriage to Sandra Dee had ended (he left her in May of 1966 and this concert was taped in November of the same year; their divorce was finalized the following year), or it could just be that this emotional version (seen in a British TV concert by Darin called “Something Special” that never aired over here) found him in a reflective mood. Whatever the case, it’s one of the best renditions of this big song from a flop musical.

 

One of the performers I was able to get my mother into from the raft of singer-songwriters I loved was the great storyteller Harry Chapin. Harry is an acquired taste because his songs were so long and the best ones among them were indeed short stories in song form. At his best he crafted these terrific little narratives that were remarkably emotional, yet contained, as in the song below. 

Of all the Chapin songs to choose to celebrate my mother I choose this one because she also had a secret desire to be a children’s book author. She wrote little stories for the family to read about myself and my sister, or the holidays, or memories she had of this or that incident. (My father used to draw the illustrations for them. I have none of these particular stories — but the tale behind that is a long and thorny one, as many of my mother’s final years were a sadly thorny situation.) 

My mother was drawn to Chapin because I would listen to his albums and she noted that they “sounded like a Broadway show.” He did indeed have a short-lived 1975 Broadway show made from his songs, The Night That Made America Famous; he appeared in the show along with his two brothers and other cast members — at that time I was too young to be into his music. She was unfortunately busy the one night that I saw Harry (at Carnegie Hall!), but we attended tributes to him together after he died.

The song below is a very beloved one among Harry’s fans (along with the exquisite “Better Place to Be” and “Corey’s Coming”); it talks about a real-life individual in a fictionalized manner. Harry read a brutally terse review of a man’s singing debut at Town Hall in Manhattan. He decided that his song would provide the man’s point of view, but also give us the review, and the aftermath, which is quiet and very touching. It is a gorgeous parable about how the arts “make us whole.”

 

And because if you’re going to talk musicals, you might as well go for the big guns: I close out with what I believe was the last Broadway show I saw with my mother. You can’t surpass Sondheim, he was truly the end of classic B’way musical-writing, and Sunday in the Park With George was one of the musicals that had a book that didn’t “let down” his absolutely impeccable songwriting. 

The best songs by Sondheim have a deeply emotional core; the best thing about the songs here is that he split the topics between the act of creation and the act of loving (and how they’re really the same thing). In this case, James Lapine’s book was split into a flawless first act (showing the creation of a painting piece by piece, which in itself is a marvel) and a somewhat bumpier second act, but one that added the notion of being “in fashion” in the art world and how raising money was a key part of the artistic process in the 20th century.

Sondheim and Lapine.

I’m trying to remember if we saw the show with both leads intact — one of my mother’s favorite topics of conversation about Broadway shows was how many “follow-up” stars she saw in lead roles, after the original lead performers have taken a hike. I believe we saw both original leads in it. In any case, this play was thankfully put on PBS and made available for the world to see. It wouldn’t’ve made a good movie (and it’s good that one time they left things at the level of a stage play, where the magic actually was).

There’s absolutely no better place to end this tribute to my mother’s “gifts.”

The pop star as character actor: Bobby Darin in the movies

Piggybacking off a binge I’ve been indulging in for the past several weeks of the music of Bobby Darin, I recently watched all of his movie acting roles chronologically. The thing that distinguished Darin musically was his willingness to take chances with his music and that impulse was definitely reflected in his acting, where he exhibited a taste for being a character person, rather than being a leading man/matinee idol type. 

Darin’s musical swerves are a large part of his legacy. The guy cracked the rock ’n’ roll market with a few hit singles (the first of which, “Splish Splash,” was also labelled as a novelty record because of its lyrics). Then, less than a year into his fame, he decided to do a 180 and release an album of him performing in the “popular standards” mode (later called everything from “middle of the road” to “lounge”) titled “That’s All.”

Once that particular iteration of Bobby Darin was established on both record and in nightclubs (esp. in Vegas, where he killed), he started performing country songs, influenced not by Dean Martin but by Ray Charles. From there Bobby started doing folk songs (older and foreign-language folk songs, in addition to the more expected Peter, Paul & Mary/Kingston Trio type of folk).

His final “break,” of which much is made because it was so extreme, was the point in October 1968 when he shed his toupee and tux jacket, grew a mustache, and later started wearing a denim jacket in his nightclub gigs; privately, he soon purged his possessions and moved to a small trailer in Big Sur. Darin did come back to the “Vegas side” of things for good after he had major heart surgery in ’71, but he continued to cover songs by newer songwriters (Laura Nyro, Randy Newman, Neil Diamond, et al) and include funkier and harder-edged songs he loved in his act for the rest of his career, until his early death at 37 in 1973 of the heart trouble that had plagued him all his life.

The reason I rattled off all the transitions above is merely to show that Darin didn’t want to make things easy for himself. He always wanted to challenge himself and move on, once he had established that he could do something very well. With acting, he did make three cute comedies with his first major show-biz girlfriend and first wife Sandra Dee, but aside from those (and one Western where he’s a pacifist sheriff), Bobby sought out difficult roles to establish that he didn’t want to be just a pop singer in actor’s guise. (Which was basically the easiest way for a singer to function as a movie star; Bobby ended up becoming the anti-Frankie Avalon [with whom he was very good friends]) These performances still impress, even if the films they are in are uneven or badly conceived from the start.

I should note that of the Darin books I’ve read, two of the best don’t have particularly great things to say about the movies he was in. The books in question are the best biography, Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin by David Evanier (2004), and the best book about Darin’s recording career and his life in the media, Bobby Darin: The Ultimate Listener’s Guide by Shane Brown (2023). I found that these books tell Darin’s story in a great fashion, but their summation of his acting talents didn’t tally with what I saw in the films. 

Darin began acting with roles in TV series. His first role was in the dramedy “Hennesey” (1959-62) starring Jackie Cooper. At this point Bobby was perfectly willing to basically play himself in a fictional setting. Here he plays a pop star who is drafted into the Navy and then tries to get out by pretending he’s sick.

His character claims to be a hillbilly and Bobby occasionally adopts a Southern accent (and is clearly supposed to be Elvis), but he’s really playing himself, as his character’s biggest hit (which is performed twice in the episode) is “Mack the Knife.” The episode aired Oct. 5, 1959.

 

Bobby’s second TV acting gig was even odder than the first. The series “Dan Raven” (1960-61) was a cop drama with Skip Homeier that had a gimmick on certain episodes: guest stars playing themselves getting involved in a crime. Mel Torme, Paul Anka, and Buddy Hackett all played themselves on the show. 

Darin is indeed “Bobby Darin” on this episode that is up in parts on YT. An old friend approaches him about possibly investing in a nightclub and — woosh! — Bobby is the No. 1 suspect in a murder case. The role isn’t all that challenging, but Bobby does have a scene where the longtime friend tells him he’s just been lucky, he doesn’t deserve to be famous; not all that many pop-stars-turned-actors would’ve agreed to act out that scene. The episode aired on Sept. 23, 1960.

 

The first film that Darin was in was Pepe (Dec. 1960). He was merely a guest star in this extravaganza (which was intended as a vehicle for Mexican comedy star Cantinflas), singing a song in a nightclub. 

The first of his starring films was a comfortable, easy choice for a pop singer’s debut as an actor: the romantic comedy Come September (Aug. 1961) starring Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. Here Rock is a millionaire who owns a big villa in Italy; his butler Walter Slezak figures that, since Rock is away for most of the year, he can turn the mansion into a hotel for tourists who want to see the Italian coastal area. Rock returns early one season and Slezak’s plans are foiled — or will Rock play along and allow the teenage girls who are staying at his villa to believe he (Rock) is only a visitor in his own house? 

That’s as silly a plot as ever graced a rom-com, but it allows for a “war of the ages” between Rock and Gina and the younger set, which consists of a group of young men (led by Bobby Darin and including a young Joel Grey as the “brainy” member of the group) pursuing the young women staying at Rock’s villa (led by, who else, the super-wholesome Ms. Sandra Dee). 

The film is a throwaway, albeit a long and very sumptuous throwaway. Director Robert Mulligan (on his way at this point to dramas like To Kill a Mockingbird and Summer of ’42) keeps the proceedings light and lively, but the 112-minute running time seems to have been a function of the budget spent on location shoots in Italy. (Comedy is best served at 90 minutes or less; every minute over that length is usually forced or bad plot exposition.)

Darin is well-cast in his role, since his character has to be an arrogant seducer who learns his lesson by the end of the film and really wants to be together with Sandra in a wholesome sorta way (read: marriage). In real life, Darin had been labelled by the press as “arrogant” because he would make decisive statements about his talent and his wanting to achieve great things by the ages of 25 and 30 in different interviews. (He was 22 when his first single broke and was 25 when Come September debuted.)

There’s also one musical number, the single “Multiplication” (which he wrote), that Darin sings onscreen in the film. (He also wrote the movie’s instrumental theme song.) He only sang onscreen in this film, his cameo in Pepe, and the failed musical State Fair. The fact that his arrogant-young-man character can swing a number in front of a band at an Italian nightspot is never explained in Come September. Rom-coms don’t need to have explanations for odd events. 

Darin really took a chance with his image by next starring in John Cassavetes’ first mainstream film as a director, Too Late Blues (Jan. 1962). The film isn’t a very mainstream one plot-wise, as it depicts the jazz world through the lens of an ambitious, increasingly bitter pianist played by Bobby. This film gets drubbed in the Darin books mentioned above (plus the Al D’Orio bio), but for me it’s in the first rank of the dozen films discussed here.

It should be noted that the IMDB places Darin in the background during certain scenes in Cassavetes’ landmark Shadows (1958). They list Bobby as being “Man wearing sun glasses, dancing and later chewing gum at rehearsal.” Well, there is a gent in shades watching the dancing girls rehearse (in what was Bob Fosse’s studio, above where Cassavetes’ acting troupe with Burton Lane rehearsed). I’ve taken screenshots of him, and despite his hair looking like Darin’s hair, it’s not Bobby.

Not Bobby Darin. (Shadows)

Back to Too Late Blues: The most interesting thing about the film is that Cassavetes sketches the jazz milieu here without romanticizing it. It should be noted that Cassavetes’ first mainstream directorial efforts were on the TV series “Johnny Staccato” (1959-’60), where he played a jazzman who gets involved in various dilemmas as a sort of unlicensed detective.

The parties the characters attend look enjoyable, but the business itself is depicted as corrupting and lethal, with the capacity to quell the spirit of any talented musician. It’s not too far to go to state that Cassavetes most likely intended to equate the jazz world with Hollywood and its intoxicating atmosphere, which would end up choking a true independent like “Ghost” Wakefield (Darin’s character). Or John Cassavetes.

In the meantime Cassavetes (who also coscripted) doesn’t make “Ghost” an overly likable character; in fact, he challenges you to like his lead figure (just as Darin himself challenged listeners to go on journeys with him from musical genre to musical genre). When Ghost becomes infatuated with a singer named Jess (Stella Stevens), he adds her to his band, initially infuriating the other members. 

But when Ghost has finally burned the bridges with his bandmates, he takes a final turn to show that he wants success at any cost — he becomes the “possession” of a rich woman who sponsors musicians she’s sleeping with. It has been noted that Too Late Blues in its rough cut was something like four hours long; it is during the gigolo portion of the narrative that one thinks back to this, because it seems like this later portion of the film would benefit from more time introducing the patron (“sugar mama”) character, whereas we take a jump in time in the film from Ghost with the band to Ghost as gigolo. 

No matter. What Cassavetes does here is sketch the downfall of a man who thought he had ethics and a professional code but also possessed a giant ego. (Again, surely something JC himself was thinking of while making this film after having written his own ticket with Shadows.) Darin is believable throughout as Ghost and in fact makes him a kind of noir figure who is tormented by his options and ultimately decides to take the easy way out. The final sequence shows Ghost watching his ex sing again with his band — but there is no chance he’s going to be accepted back in the group.

Stella Stevens, appearing in her fourth film here, gets to run through a gamut of emotions in her role as the would-be jazz singer who has no confidence in her voice. Of note is the fact that her character makes a stark suicide attempt, in what seems like a dry run for a later traumatic sequence in A Woman Under the Influence.

Also appearing in the film are a number of Cassavetes’ personal friends, who were in more than one of his features. These names include Val Avery, Rupert Crosse, and (making his movie debut here) Seymour Cassel. From this point onward I will include a bonus cast designation to indicate character performers who brightened up a film (or in the case of some of the lesser pics, supplied some enjoyment). Also featured in the film in good supporting roles are future “Ben Casey” costars Vince Edwards (here playing a mean-ass bully) and Nick Dennis. 

Bobby was exceptionally busy at the beginning of the Sixties; this is underscored by the fact that four movies that featured him in a prominent role (either starring or key supporting) were released in 1962. The first is a pretty lackluster remake of State Fair (March 1962). This time out, new songs were added to the score by Richard Rodgers (operating alone, since Oscar Hammerstein II had recently died).

The film revolves around the romances of farmer/race-car driver Pat Boone and his sister Pamela Tiffin, who have affairs with the electric performers in the picture, namely Ann-Margret and Bobby Darin. Unfortunately, though, we are indeed stuck with Boone and Tiffin and their parents, played by Alice Faye and Tommy Ewell, for the majority of the running time. 

Ann-Margret at least gets to manifest as a devil girl in a musical number (not as much fun as it would’ve been about 4–5 years later; the number needed David Winters on choreography and George Sidney directing). Bobby get one solo and sings along with two other group songs. The movie is wholesome and pretty dreary, but Darin again is “revved up” (more so than Boone in the racing scenes) as a TV newsman trying to move up to a national slot.

Bonus cast: Mr. Peepers himself, Wally Cox, is present in a few scenes as the judge of various foods at the state fair. 

Bobby with Steve McQueen.

Bobby’s next role was a supporting part in Don Siegel’s Hell is for Heroes (June 1962). Siegel was a helluva great director, but he had little to work with here script-wise and reportedly had many fights with the film’s star, Steve McQueen.

The film’s plot finds a small infantry division holding back the Germans in France. The one virtue the film has is its modest size: It was clearly made quickly and on-budget and thankfully is only 90 minutes long. McQueen plays a surly loner and seems like he’s walking through the film in a trance. Fess Parker is the head of the division, with Darin cast as the wiseass city kid who runs sideline hustles, selling things to his fellow soldiers. Best appreciated by fans of all war pictures, it does boast a great cast, which belongs… below.

Bobby with Bob Newhart.

Bonus cast: The other members of the division are played by, among others, Harry Guardino, James Coburn, Nick Adams, and Bob Newhart, in his movie debut. Newhart is the film’s comic relief and in one scene he’s told to convince the Germans (who have planted a spy device in the division’s territory) that everything is going well. He does this by basically doing a phone routine, similar to the kind of thing that he put on this best-selling LPs of the early Sixties.

Bobby was then paired with his wife Sandra Dee in the romantic comedy If a Man Answers (Oct. 10, 1962). All of these rom-coms had misunderstanding or “liar gets discovered” plotlines, and this one isn’t any different. Dee plays a woman who is advised on romance by her French mother (Micheline Presle), who not for a minute seems like Dee’s mother.

Her mother tells her that when a woman’s marriage is failing she should pretend to cheat on her husband to make him jealous. Dee does this, creating a fake lover with the same name as the fake lover her mother used to rekindle the romance with her father. Darin eventually tips to the plot and invites said lover to visit the couple’s apartment for dinner.

The premise is indeed ridiculous, but this is perhaps the best of the three Darin-Dee films, if only because the plot isn’t as slight as Come September or as absolutely ridiculous as That Funny Feeling. These were the only all-out comedies that Darin acted in on the big screen, and he was perfectly skilled to play in the classically “blinkered” way that most male characters behaved in these films. 

Bonus cast: Darin’s invited guest, the supposed lover of his wife is played by Cesar Romero. Cesar is later revealed to be Bobby’s dad, which is casting as silly as that of Presle and Dee as mother and daughter. 

Pressure Point (Oct. 10, 1962; same day as If a Man Answers!) is considered by many to be the high-water mark of Darin’s acting career. In this instance he took a completely unlikable lead role as an American Nazi who is the patient of a Black psychiatrist, played by Sidney Poitier, in 1942. 

Stanley Kramer, devoted maker of “message pictures,” produced the film, but it was written and directed by Hubert Cornfield, best known for the evangelical drama Angel Baby and the Brando kidnapping drama Night of the Following Day. According to Sidney Poitier, Kramer was the one who wanted the psychiatrist character to be Black.

The film primarily centers around the mental battles between the psychiatrist and the Nazi. Although an Expressionist series of flashback sequences (where younger Darin is played by Barry Gordon, from A Thousand Clowns!) are truly corny as hell, the sequences between Poitier and Darin bristle, because Poitier’s doctor character can’t let his racist patient know that he’s gotten under his skin and is driving him (the doctor) to completely loathe being in the man’s presence. 

The master Hirschfeld illustrates scenes
from the film.

Poitier was always rock-solid in his performances, but what is surprising here is how well Darin keeps up with him and is a perfect antagonist for the piece. It was an incredible choice for Darin to have made — risking being hated by the audience, who (with the exception of very racist viewers) were always going to be on Poitier’s side. It definitely stands as one of three truly significant roles that Darin took, making him decidedly the opposite of the pop stars who would never appear in a film where they wouldn’t be loved by the viewers.

Bonus cast: The film contained so much incendiary material and seemed to dwell in such a weird corner of psychodrama hell that it was felt that a frame device would help to explain the situation better to the viewer. Thus, we see an aged Poitier explaining to a young psychiatrist why he should continue to work with a difficult patient; the young shrink in question is played by Peter Falk. 

Captain Newman, M.D. (Dec. 1963) was the film that earned Darin a Best Supporting Actor nomination (he lost to Melvyn Douglas for Hud). The film itself is a very bizarre creation, equal parts drama and comedy, with the comedy registering as just ridiculous and the drama getting almost lost in the shuffle. 

The source for the film’s schizophrenic script was a book by Leo Rosten about the WWII experiences of his friend, a psychiatrist who worked with soldiers’s PTSD (and later, according to the Wiki entry for the film, became a Hollywood shrink, working with Sinatra, Marilyn, and Tony Curtis!). Gregory Peck, in his most-serious cardboard mode, plays the title character, who is overseeing a psychiatric ward in a military hospital in 1944.

The comedy plot strands almost exclusively revolve around Peck’s orderly, a con man played by Tony Curtis. In this strand, we see Curtis’s character funnel supplies to the ward in various ways, including a salami (yes, there’s a whole sequence involving a salami stolen from an Italian colonel, played by Curtis’s real-life friend Larry Storch). This is where numerous faces TV viewers later saw as regulars on weekly series pop up. 

Darin awaits a "flak juice" session.

The dramatic plot strand should have actually been the only one, as it highlights the problems of soldiers tormented by their experiences in the war. Three particular cases result in memorable sequences: the first involves a troubled colonel played by Eddie Albert (who commits suicide leaping from a water tower; this scene appears in the film sandwiched by comic moments). 

The other two soldiers afflicted with traumatic memories provide the best moments in the film, which is way too long for its own good (126 minutes). The first is a Southerner, played by Darin, who feels guilty about abandoning his fellow soldiers when his plane crashed.

Darin has a tour de force scene where he recalls the crash while under sodium pentothal. The scene finds Darin crying, screaming, and wailing — Tony Curtis found Darin’s performance to be overdone and awful, but then again Curtis wasn’t the kind of post-Brando/post-Dean actor that Darin succeeded in becoming. Bobby’s performance might seem super-charged, but that’s because he’s an impassioned performer playing against Peck at his stolid worst.

Young Robert Duvall in the
film's serious strand.

The third traumatized soldier is played by a young Robert Duvall. His character is catatonic because he survived the German invasion and occupation of a town by staying hidden in a cellar, thus never being taken hostage. Duvall’s performance is much quieter than Darin’s, but he too was clearly working with the post-Brando model of acting and his scenes are very wrenching, despite appearing in a film that jumps back and forth between the sublime and the ridiculous. 

Bonus cast: Plenty of familiar TV faces show up in the film, including Angie Dickinson, Jane Withers, Dick Sargent, James Gregory, Ted Bessell, and Vito Scotti (who sings "Hava Nagila" — don't ask!). 

Darin next appeared as an actor in an episode of “Wagon Train,” the eight-season Western show (1957-1965) that had a regular cast of characters but was better known for its guest stars playing people encountering the wagon train — thus making it both a regular Western series and also an anthology drama.

Darin with Betsy Hale.

The episode with Darin was part of the eighth and last season of the show; it aired on Oct. 4, 1964. Darin plays an outlaw on the run who ends up with the wagon train after a little girl discovers him hiding from lawmen. His character begins as a hard-bitten gunfighter type, but after a scene or two we realize that he’s actually a good guy in bad guy disguise. He will obviously grow to emotionally respond to the little girl who is a double whammy when it comes to sentimental drama: both an orphan *and* terminally ill!

Thus, Darin’s character has what they now refer to as an “arc,” but what remains most interesting after having read about his life is that as of July 1963 he began having medical issues while touring the nightclub circuit. (In that month he was rushed to a hospital after collapsing onstage at Freedomland in New York.)

It’s not hard to imagine that Darin liked the idea of playing an outlaw but also responded to the script’s being about a terminally ill child. A major part of Darin’s mythology is that he was a frail child who had bouts of rheumatic fever that weakened his heart; as a boy, he overheard a doctor saying that he probably would only live until 16, 25 if he was lucky.

Thus, knowing that Darin was working in a “method” manner, one can only assume that his own medical situation made him connect to a character who bonds with a terminally ill child. The fact that the child dies at the episode’s end and Darin rides off in handcuffs (as he allows himself to be caught so he can carry her body back to the wagon train) was pure tearjerking American TV, but it definitely seems like the correct ending for the drama. The only happy thing about the ending was that Darin’s outlaw bonded with the child and had her buried with his last name.

 

Only a fragment exists online of Darin’s next performance, on “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater” (1963-67), an anthology series that boasted some great stars and talented writers and directors. Darin’s episode, “Murder in the First,” was directed by Sydney Pollack and coscripted by Stirling Silliphant, who wrote many episodes of “Naked City” and “Route 66.” It aired on Oct 9, 1964, less than a week after the “Wagon Train” episode. 

What we get to see here is a laidback interrogation scene, in which Bobby once again is seen giving an intense performance. The episode looks pretty good from this fragment (in terrible shape), but we’ll never know until we see the whole thing.

 

That Funny Feeling (Aug. 1965) was Bobby’s last starring role in a mainstream Hollywood “A” picture. It was also his last film with Sandra Dee; the couple divorced in ’67. 

Here the rom-com plotting is extremely absurd. Dee’s character works for a freelance maid service and has been cleaning Darin’s apartment. When she meets him by chance, she doesn’t place him as the gent whose apartment she’s been cleaning, so she lies to him and tells him she lives in his apartment (which she has the keys to, thanks to her job).

Bobby doesn’t say anything about this lie, since he wants to see how she can play out the scenario of living there. He moves in with his boss (played by one of Darin’s comic-actor heroes, Donald O’Connor) and changes his life around to accommodate her lie.

The absurdity continues to the point that, when Dee is finally aware that Darin knows she doesn’t live in the apartment, she throws a party for all the women in his little black book and asks them to dress as Parisian hookers. It’s hard to get any sillier than that. The result is a pleasant farce, light as air, but not anything you’ll remember very fondly after it’s over. (Darin also composed the full score for the picture.) 

In the film only Bobby is in his underwear
in this scene. But for the Italian lobby card....

Bonus cast: Nita Talbot, Leo G. Carroll (as an Irish pawnbroker), gravel-voiced Robert Strauss, and Larry Storch as Dee and Talbot’s neighbor. He plays an unemployed actor who seems to be “the gay best friend” in certain scenes and not in others.

Darin’s next role was on TV in an episode of “Run For Your Life” (1965-68) that was intended as a pilot for a spinoff series starring Bobby. The premise of “Run” found Ben Gazzara playing a terminally ill man moving through different situations. In the episode in question, “Who’s Watching the Fleshpot?”, Gazzara’s character reconnects with an old friend, played by Darin, in a small French town. 

The episode is an absolutely charming one, as Gazzara and Darin had a great rapport. (One can see Gazzara and his wife Janis Rule attending Bobby’s “comeback” to the Coconut Grove in 1966 in newsreel footage found on YT.) Darin’s character is a tour guide, but one who is clearly also a traveler and a charismatic con man. The actual plot of the show follows Gazzara and Darin as they show an American mother (Eve Arden) and daughter around the French town, and open up the daughter to new experiences (as she is a very prim and proper, no-nonsense lady). 

The second half of the episode has crooked Jeff Corey and his sidekick trying to steal a pricey car that Arden left to Gazzara and Darin. Throughout the episode there’s a nice camaraderie between the two leads, which perhaps defeated the idea of Darin getting his own series. (The notion is even planted that Gazzara would guest-star on such a show.) When an adventure succeeds because of the natural connection between the two leads, it’s hard to imagine breaking one lead away for his own set of exploits. 

IMDB identifies the scripter of the episode as Roy Huggins, the creator of “Run For Your Life,” but the script was in fact written by John Thomas James. [UPDATE: I've been informed that J.T. James was a Huggins pseudonym!] The show aired March 7, 1966.

Bonus cast: Nicholas Colasanto plays Jeff Corey’s Italian sidekick.

This episode should be in color and has been rerun on "nostalgia channels" in perfect quality. But I'll take what I can get when it comes to seeing these things online at a minute's notice.

 

Bobby’s last starring role in a movie was in the B-western Gunfight in Abilene (March 1967). It’s his only heroic role, but one can see what attracted him to the material: It’s the tale of a gent who shot his best friend by mistake in the Civil War and has thus sworn to never carry a gun again. He keeps up this pacifist decision even when appointed mayor of the small town he comes from — but eventually he’s going to have to use a gun. (This is a Western, after all.)

Interestingly, the “sheriff who refuses to carry a gun” plot was used in an episode of the cult series “The Prisoner,” in the Western episode, called “Living in Harmony.” (Dec. 1967) Darin attended civil rights protests throughout the Sixties and was vehemently against the Vietnam War as the decade wore on; one can easily see why he chose this particular Western to be a part of, but he wound up hating it, labeling it “Gunfight at Shit Creek.” Bobby also wrote the score for this picture and a lovely theme song, “Amy.”

The one notable thing about the plot is that the meanest villain in the piece is played by Leslie Nielsen, who sports a fake hand, as his character supposedly lost his hand in an accident that Darin’s character caused. Nielsen thus sports a giant fake hand that looks like it came out of a monster movie. 

Bonus cast: Michael Sarrazin plays the young man who is bound to be killed before long. There is always one of these in a standard-issue Western. 

At this point, Darin alternated TV acting roles with very sporadic work in supporting roles in films. Stranger in the House (aka Cop-Out) (May 1967, U.K.; Jan 1968, U.S.) is a very uneven adaptation of a Simenon novel that was first adapted in 1942 by Henri Decoin (starring Raimu) and later on by George Lautner as a 1992 vehicle for Belmondo. Its last adaptation was a 1997 straight-to-video feature that starred Steve Railsback.

James Mason stars as a drunk, disillusioned lawyer who is called back into service when his daughter’s boyfriend is arrested for the murder of a drifter. The daughter is played by a bowl-cut-sporting Geraldine Chaplin, who has nothing to do except be disapproving of Mason and be party-centric; the drifter is played by Bobby Darin.

Darin’s character is a curiosity in this version — an American con-man/drifter (first seen sporting a sailor’s hat and jacket, but is he a sailor? Could be…) who ends up becoming part of Chaplin’s social circle and even begins to live in the attic of the house that she and Mason share. His murder sets in motion the third act of the film, in which Mason goes back to being a practicing barrister (and seeming amateur sleuth).

Here Bobby is quite content playing a totally reprehensible guy who is not “explained,” as with the Nazi in Pressure Point. “Barney” is just a guy who latches on to some rich young Brits and is willing to risk his life hitting on the girls in the group (especially Chaplin) and infuriating his eventual murderer. Darin’s devotion to his role is complete, but this is really Mason’s film from start to finish, with his performance being the most striking (mostly because his character is the best written).

The Happy Ending (Dec. 1969) is certainly an odd late Sixties drama, in that it concerns a middle-aged marriage in which all the love is gone. Brooks was best known for tough dramas like The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood and “hot box” Tennessee Williams adaptations (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth), but he was also a writer-director who liked to sketch characters (Elmer Gantry, Looking for Mr. Goodbar). He was also married to Jean Simmons from 1960 to ’80, so it was clear he would create a vehicle for her when she was no longer getting as many leading roles. 

That said, the film has some interest because of the ensemble of characters he surrounded Simmons’ middle-aged wife with. She may feel no love or sexual attraction in her marriage to John Forsythe, but she does have a number of friends to commiserate with, from a group of wives she meets with at the local gym to her college chum (Shirley Jones) whom she meets again when — major plot point here! — she ditches her 16th wedding anniversary party and flies to Nassau.

In Nassau one of the people she encounters is a gigolo played by Darin. He has a very small role here (barely 10 minutes), but it’s an intriguing one and one that allows him to make fun of his receding hairline. His gigolo seduces Simmons with a fairly good Italian accent and tales of his life as a journalist. He caresses her leg until he hears that neither she nor her husband are rich. 

At that point Darin drops the accent and tells her about being a “hustler from L.A., down on his luck.” He gives a little speech that is a priceless takedown of himself: “Jesus, lady, I’m 34, my hair’s falling out. You were my long shot. ...Sorry, lady, I can’t afford to waste it. Lady, I used to be a pistol. Bang, bang, load, reload, now… Anyhow, I’ve gotta save it, in case. I mean, what if something finally turned up and I couldn’t make the scene? [shudders] I’d say we both got the shitty end of the stick.” Simmons proceeds to drape on him what looks to be a 100-dollar bill tied to one of her stockings.

An autographed photo of Bobby
and Jean Simmons in Happy Ending.

I included the above dialogue to show that the film is well-written, despite it not being a revelation — Cassavetes’ Faces covered the same turf around the same time and was much harder-hitting in its view of middle-aged married couples. The film did have one great legacy, though: The song “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” by Michel Legrand and Marilyn and Alan Bergman made its debut here. (It was nominated for a Best Song Oscar but lost; in the meantime it’s been covered by many singers.) 

Bonus cast: Lloyd Bridges, Nanette Fabray, and, as John Forsythe’s boss, Dick Shawn, who is openly cheating on his wife, Tina Louise.

There had to be a dreary moment in this “survey” of Darin’s acting work, and it definitely came with a viewing of the “Ironside” episode he had a supporting role in. While his performance is indeed fun — he’s a shifty, sleazy professional gambler (right down to the pinkie ring). The show itself, though, was always a bore, in the vein of many late Sixties/Seventies cop dramas.

The plot concerns Ironside’s efforts to discover who killed a cop friend of his. Is it Darin’s sleazy gambler character, his just-as-sleazy (but not colorful) boss, or perhaps a corrupt cop? It’s none of them, but no one will care by the time the episode is over.

The only noteworthy scene is one that is unintentionally funny: When Bobby races his car to get away from Ironside’s people (who arrive in a mini-van), Ironside himself tumbles out of the back of the van in his wheelchair. He falls to the ground, and one is again found wondering how in the hell an obese man in a wheelchair is supposed to be physically fighting crime. (Ironside made the overweight “Cannon” seem like a bodybuilder.)

One thing that can be said about these late Sixties/Seventies cop shows (with the exception of “Kojak” and “Streets of San Francisco,” which had some great episodes) is that their theme songs were better than the series. That’s definitely true of the “Ironside” theme, composed by Quincy Jones. The episode with Darin, called “The Gambling Game,” aired on Oct. 5, 1971, and is available in perfect condition (why?) on Roku.

In 1970 Darin wrote, produced, and directed a film called The Vendors, which was shelved after being shot and edited. There are a few eye-witness quotes in the books on Darin that it was a terrible film, but one wishes it had at least gotten some kind of distribution so we could’ve made up our own minds about it. As it stands, either Darin’s son Dodd has a copy of it, or no one does. 

Darin returned to TV with his last lengthy guest-star role, as a bad guy in the Glenn Ford modern-day cowboy/crime series “Cade’s County” (1971-’72). Bobby is a criminal who believes he is Billy the Kid and so carries out crimes in the old-fashioned way — although in the episode’s first scene he uses a very modern rocket launcher to nail a bank truck.

The episode, “A Gun for Billy,” was directed by later noted movie director Richard Donner and aired on Nov. 28, 1971. It definitely moves along pretty quickly and moves back and forth between “Billy” (Darin) planning another robbery and Glenn Ford and his deputies (who include Edgar Buchanan, from “Petticoat Junction”) trying to identify and then stop him.

This is another instance of Bobby in his villainous guise: lacking the toupee he wore onstage when in “show-biz mode”; dyed back hair; and a small mustache. This episode is by no means a must-see, but again, it moves (unlike “Ironside,” which moved as slowly as its star, Raymond Burr). 

Bonus cast: David Doyle plays a psychiatrist Ford quizzes to get info on Billy, and Leif Garrett (!) is Billy’s son, whom he takes on his final job.

Bobby’s very last TV acting appearance was in one of those “time filler” short segments on Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery.” Here he is again in his “bad guy look” as a crook trying to flee the country. Jack Albertson plays a man who says he can deliver Darin to safety and… we know something will go wrong. 

The segment was called “Dead Weight,” runs less than ten minutes, and aired on Feb. 9, 1972. 

Happy Mother’s Day, Love George (aka Run Stranger Run) (Aug. 1973) is the last film that Bobby appeared in. He has a small role and it’s another character part, that of a guy running a local greasy spoon with his girlfriend, played by Cloris Leachman.

The film was released to theaters (in fact, I read about a press party they had for it recently in an old Interview magazine) but basically is a glorified TV movie. Darren McGavin (Kolchak himself) directed, and Robert Clouse wrote the script, which means that it was most likely dreamt up when McGavin appeared in the 1972 horror TV movie “Something Evil” (directed by Steven Spielberg), which had a script by Clouse (who is best known for directing martial arts films, including Bruce Lee’s best vehicle, Enter the Dragon).

The cast McGavin assembled is the only reason to watch the film. It is half a “homecoming” TV movie and half (or perhaps really a third?) a whodunit with horror overtones. A stranger (Ron Howard, just before American Graffiti) comes back to a small New England town. He wants to confront his mother (who turns out to be Leachman), who gave him away for adoption, and find out who his father was. Simultaneous to this a murder spree is taking place — signaled by the appearance of bones and skulls along the coast of the town.

Darin and Cloris Leachman.

The murder plot is finally reconciled into the Ron Howard plotline late in the film. Leachman, it is revealed, slept with her sister’s husband and thus came Opie. The sister is played by Patricia Neal, who is very good for this kind of “bent” family saga; her real-life daughter Tessa Dahl makes a great impression (in one of her few movie roles) as Neal’s crazy but seductive daughter. 

Darin has minimal screen time, but by this time he had truly become a “character actor” and excelled in that sort of work. (Plus, it probably took nothing away from his nightclub gigs and was less taxing to his health doing a few days’ shoot on a small film/TV project.)

Bonus cast: This is yet another film Darin was in that contained numerous familiar faces from TV. Among them are Thayer David, singer Gale Garnett, Simon Oakland (Kolchak’s “Vincenzo”), and McGavin himself, seen in photos as the dead “George” of the title.

I don’t recommend seeing every film and TV episode Bobby Darin did unless you are a fan of his music first and foremost, or you’re interested in how a pop idol (who then became a nightclub superstar and was always an interesting pop/rock/folk/country composer) could settle into actually acting rather than being “placed” in prime movie/TV roles as a glitzy guest star (or do it as a shell of his former self, as so many pop stars become). 

NOTE: There are two other TV acting performances by Darin that are not available online at this time (from “Burke’s Law” and the anthology series “The Danny Thomas Hour”). The films (except for the final title) and the "Night Gallery" segment can all be found in perfect condition on ok.ru. Thanks to Paul Gallagher for his help with finding these titles.