Its a helluva career BECAUSE he played both those amiable nice Disney guys and those three famous heels..though indeed the heels will likely be the ones who last, because they are in three great movies.
MacMurray had a lot of luck...his "regular" leading man career was dying out in the fifties when he got the Disney offer to do "The Shaggy Dog"(1957) and ended up with a contract laid out that got him over ten more years of Disney features.
And then, around 1960, he took the TV gig on "My Three Sons" but got a cool working deal -- two days a week on set, the rest of the week golfing -- and got rich off the show, too. Fred MacMurray was never at Bogart star level, but he lived a lot longer and died very rich.
IN BETWEEN all of this, MacMurray agreed to play a villain for Billy Wilder(his Double Indemnity director) "just one more time"(after the first actor who signed to play Sheldrake, Paul Douglas, died of a sudden heart attack) and it ends up being perhaps his greatest performance of them all.
Here's why: Sheldrake's villainy is almost EXACTLY like MacMurray's "good guy performances." Sheldrake, too, often seems a bit befuddled -- he's such a psycho he doesn't even understand his own evil -- and he tends to couch his nastiest threats in that same good-guy sing song manner("It takes years to make it to the 27th floor, but only 30 seconds to be back on the street. You dig?")
Even when Sheldrake is being tough -- as in his first in-office shakedown of Baxter -- he's "faking it." Sheldrake SEEMS upset and upstanding that all those guys are getting Baxter's key...until HE asks for the key...
MacMurray told a famous story about promoting a movie at Disneyland shortly after "The Apartment" came out. A woman hit him with her purse and said "Don't EVER play a role like that again."
So Sheldrake WAS punished. And MacMurray never played a role like that again. To my knowledge. Maybe a TV movie?
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BTW, of his three "rats," isn't the one who is actually a KILLER -- the guy in "Double Indemnity," actually pretty sympathetic after all. He steers the young man to the stepdaughter, and he and Eddie G. clearly love each other...
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PretoriaDZ
11 years ago
That's so true about his and Eddie Robinson's characters caring about each other. I remember, in acting class, learning that the way to play a bad guy true is to find their rationalization for the stuff they did (because everyone feels like they have a good reason for their behavior, even if it's bad behavior). That way, you can perform without telegraphing to the audience "I know I'm a creep." I think for that character, in Double Indemnity, MacMurray's character tells himself that the sexual attraction is just too strong for him to resist and that's part of what makes it an even stronger attraction - gives him leave to be a bad boy.
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Piperson
11 years ago
Agree with all your comments about Fred MacMurray. He was a great under-rated actor.
It always surprises me to think of Paul Douglas playing that role instead. He was a good actor but I think that MacMurray is much more the right physical type for Fran to be stuck on. Strange how these things come about.
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rjrmemorabilia2
11 years ago
I think because of all those Disney roles, people forgot exactly how good of an actor Fred MacMurray truly was. What about the one he hung Van Johnson out to dry in The Caine Mutiny? Or the early version of Green Acres with Claudette Colbert called The Egg And I? Those two roles are about as diverse as you can get.
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ecarle
11 years ago
Agree with all your comments about Fred MacMurray.
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Thanks.
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He was a great under-rated actor.
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But at least he got paid well, what with My Three Sons and the Disney flicks in his later years...and he hardly had to wrk on My Three Sons.
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It always surprises me to think of Paul Douglas playing that role instead. He was a good actor but I think that MacMurray is much more the right physical type for Fran to be stuck on. Strange how these things come about.
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Yes, oftimes one actor replaces another...but it is rare when the first choice DIES. Paul Douglas was a bit too big and burly for the part(kind of the James Gandolfini of his time...and yikes, Gandolfini died of heart attack around the same age)...it works so much better with "nice guy" MacMurray slowly revealing his evil and venality.
Not that I wanted Paul Douglas to die just for MacMurray to get the role but...
...I'm not sure it would have quite been the classic it is without MacMurray there.
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movieghoul
11 years ago
Exactly, Macmurray is in fact a quintessential Hitchcock villain in all 3 films: charming on the outside, but ice cold inside.
Which is one reason why I can't see Paul Douglas as Sheldrake: Douglas usually had a gruff exterior but kind and gentle underneath.
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