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Murray Hamilton: "The Mayor of Shark City"

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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I would like to veer here to a quick look at the actor who played Mayor Vaughn in Jaws, because both personally and objectively, I find the man's career to have been fascinating in a specific Hollywood way(the comeback) and I read of something very touching about his work on ...Jaws 2.

His name was Murray Hamilton, and if you saw a lot of late 50s movies on 60s TV(which I did as a kid,I'm fairly old now), he was around a LOT in movies.

In 1959, Murray Hamilton did two movies with James Stewart. In "The FBI Story," Hamilton is Stewart's FBI partner , and after they have a shootout with Pretty Boy Floyd or somebody, they are crouched on the ground and we get this exchange:

Hamilton: Are you alright?
Stewart: Yeah.
Hamilton: Good...because I'm NOT.

And Murray dies in Jimmy's arms. Its a scene you don't forget when you're young...the "best pal" who dies alongside his friend.

Also in '59, Murray, in Anatomy of a Murder, played a bartender/witness to murder whom defense attorney James Stewart destroys on the witness stand. What I like is, the next day during a break in the trial, Stewart goes to Hamilton's bar and orders a drink from the seething Hamilton, and says: "Oh, come on. No hard feelings, are there? I was just doing my job." The Trial Lawyer -- why we hate them.

In that late 50's corridor, you can find Murray Hamilton as Andy Griffith's Army pal in No Time for Sergeants, as support to Cary Grant in Houseboat, as Tony Perkins' college basketball coach in Tall Story..he was EVERYWHERE.

And then...he sort of disappeared. An IMDb check shows not really, though. He disappeared from MOVIES and did a lot of TV.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

And then...in 1967...Hamilton got the role of the cuckolded "Mr. Robinson" in the blockbuster The Graduate(after Gene Hackman was fired by Mike Nichols as "too young.")

Hamilton gets two great scenes:

(1) boozily coming home from golf to his home to find a nervous Dustin Hoffman waiting for him in his living room(Mrs. Robinson has just hit hard on Dustin sexually), and telling the wheezing Hoffman to "enjoy your youth." I like how the ice cubes clink in Mr. Robinson's glass of scotch and how he keeps saying "Ben...." with a certain fatherly care.

(2) Later, having discovered that Ben has been Mrs. Robinson's lover and now seeks his daughter's hand in marriage, Mr. Robinson goes berserk: "I think you are FILTH! I think you are SCUM! I think you are a DEGENERATE!"

Yep, I remember those two scenes.

And then Murray Hamilton disappeared again(oh, plenty of TV work) for 8 years and ended up -- in exhausted, gray-haired middle age, with his Role of a Lifetime: the Mayor of Shark City.

I KNEW of Murray Hamilton's long career when I saw Jaws(especially the old James Stewart movies) and seeing him in "Jaws" was like seeing a long lost friend.

Coda: I read somewhere that when Murray Hamilton returned for Jaws 2 (a much lesser film than Jaws) he learned that his hospitalized wife had only days to live. Hamilton asked to be written out of the movie; he said "any way it happens, I'm not staying here to make this movie while my wife is dying." The producers came up with a plan to film ALL of Hamilton's scenes in one DAY...and he got to his wife in time to be with her when she died.