I’ve been thinking a lot about
James Garner lately, not just because he is among my favorite
actors, but because one of the characters he’s best known for having portrayed--Jim Rockford of
The Rockford Files--is contending in
The Rap Sheet’s second online poll for
the title of “best TV private eye in history.” It’s
Garner’s 79th birthday today, and that got me to thinking about a short tribute to him I penned last year for my other blog,
Limbo. I’ve used that post as the basis for this longer panegyric.
Born
James Scott Bum
garner in
Norman, Oklahoma, on this date in 1928, the man who would be Rockford was the son of a carpet layer. His mother (through whom
Garner is one quarter
Cherokee--a fact recalled in the name of his film and TV production company, Cherokee Productions) died when young
James was just 4 years old, and he and his two older brothers,
Jack and Charles, were sent to live with relatives. Only after their father remarried in 1934, was the family reunited--but by no means peacefully. According to Wikipedia, “
Garner grew to hate his stepmother, Wilma, who beat all three boys, but especially young
James. When he was 14,
James finally had enough of his ‘wicked stepmother’ and after a particularly heated battle, she left for good. As
James’ brother Jack commented, ‘She was a damn no-good woman.’”
At age 16,
James Bum
garner joined the
United States Merchant Marine, but he had to leave after a year, due to chronic seasickness. He moved west to Los Angeles, where his dad was living since the breakup of his second marriage. There he attended
Hollywood High School and modeled for Portland, Oregon-based swimsuit manufacturer
Jantzen (at $25 an hour), but he “hated” modeling and returned to Norman, where he played high school football and basketball (“If there was a ball, I played it”) before joining the U.S. Army as an infantryman during the
Korean War. (He would receive two Purple Hearts for his military service.)
As the story goes, his first acting experience came while he was still attending Hollywood High. A friend persuaded him to take a non-speaking role in the Broadway production of Herman Wouk’s
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. After that he starred in TV commercials and eventually captured roles on such series as
Zane Grey Theater,
Conflict, and
Cheyenne. His earliest movie appearances were in 1956, when he could be seen in both
Toward the Unknown (with William Holden) and
The Girl He Left Behind (with Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood). As to why he changed his surname ... the explanation is that one of the film studios he worked for abbreviated “Baum
garner” to “
Garner” (without permission), and he eventually went along with it. (He changed his name legally in the late 1950s.)
I was first introduced to
Garner’s work during weekend reruns of the renowned
Roy Huggins-created TV western,
Maverick, one of my father’s favorite programs and also among the inspirations for my continuing interest in the history of the American West.
Garner of course played Bret Maverick (1957-1960), a not too rough-and-tumble riverboat gambler who roamed the dusty, sometimes lusty U.S. frontier as much for fast bucks as adventure, becoming--
as the theme song goes--“a legend of the west.” After that, I followed his career through a tumbling succession of
memorable films--from
The Great Escape (1963),
The Wheeler Dealers (1963) and
The Americanization of Emily (1964), to the better-remembered
Support Your Local Sheriff (1969),
Marlowe (an underappreciated 1969 film based on one of
Raymond Chandler’s private eye novels,
The Little Sister),
Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971) and
Skin Game (1971). Along the way,
Garner starred in an unfortunately short-lived NBC-TV series called
Nichols, which found him in the comfortable role of a cowardly, apathetic drifter (not so very different from the parts he’d played in
Gunfighter and
Skin Game) who, in 1914, leaves the army and returns to his small Arizona hometown ... only to be promptly blackmailed into taking the job of sheriff.
Garner, who was extremely fond of
Nichols, took its cancellation hard; the only good thing about it was that it left him free to take the lead three years later in
The Rockford Files, another Huggins-created series.
Rockford cast
Garner as a resourceful, smooth-talking, but distinctly unheroic Los Angeles private eye who never seemed to find an easy-paying client, a regular girlfriend, or a decent place to hang his hat (he lived in a dilapidated Nashua trailer in a Malibu parking lot).
James Scott Rockford was effectively Bret Maverick for the 1970s, but with all of his horses under a Pontiac Firebird hood and a father who (
unlike the philosophizing “Pappy” in Maverick) showed up more often than not, in the kindly person of
Noah Beery Jr., the nephew of film legend
Wallace Beery. During its six-year run (1974-1980)--which would have been longer, had
Garner not been forced to pull out after injuring himself in the course of doing too many of his own stunts--
Rockford picked up an impressive five Emmy Awards (including a Best
Actor commendation for
Garner) and was ranked by
TV Guide as one the 50 finest American television shows ever. “When it came to private eyes--at least, the ones on movies and TV--Jim Rockford ... stood out like a slow curve in a world of fast balls,” opines Ed Robertson, who literally wrote the book on
Garner’s gumshoe drama (
Thirty Years of The Rockford Files, 2005).
After
Rockford signed off as a series for the last time (only to spawn a
sequence of popular TV movies during the Clinton era), the then 53-year-old
Garner sought to return to his other most familiar small-screen role in NBC’s
Bret Maverick (1981), which reimagined the former card sharp and con man semi-retiring to a backwater Arizona town. Sadly, that series--which I thought went a long way toward recapturing the vitality and humor of the original--lasted only a year, after which
Garner returned to the silver screen, appearing in
Victor/Victoria (1982, along with Julie Andrews),
Murphy’s Romance (1985, with Sally Field),
Sunset (1988, which had him portraying a crusty-but-romantic
Wyatt Earp to Bruce Willis’ cowboy
actor Tom Mix),
Maverick (1994, in which he played the role of an impatient marshal, while Mel Gibson--in his pre-zealot days--assumed the part of brother Bret),
Twilight (1998, with Paul Newman), and
Space Cowboys (2000, with Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones). He also signed on for a few TV movies, including
Barbarians at the Gate (1993),
Breathing Lessons (1994), and
Legalese (1998, which included the casually stunning
Mary-Louise Parker as
Garner’s sexy, thoroughly ambitious junior law partner).
Following
The West Wing’s award-winning early success,
Garner made another stab at series television, working opposite Joe Mantegna on
First Monday (2002), about the U.S. Supreme Court.
Garner portrayed a football-loving conservative Chief Justice of the United States (a funny role for
Garner, who’s a staunch Democrat, and was briefly courted to run for the 1990 Democratic nomination for governor of California). Unfortunately, audiences didn’t seem to care about earnest debate in the High Court the way they did about political strategizing and character assassination in the White House.
First Monday didn’t make it into a second year.
Garner went on to play a classically crusty grandfather on
8 Simple Rules ... for Dating My Teenage Daughter, an unremarkable part he took on after the untimely, 2003 death of lead
John Ritter. The Internet Movie Database says he’ll be starring in a 2008 film called
The Magic Shoe and doing voice work for an animated flick,
Terra.
I’ve never met
James Garner, and I am sure that he isn’t to be confused with the easygoing, lovable characters he has so often portrayed. But he’s given me four decades of enjoyment on screens large and small, and for that, he earns my best wishes on 79 years down, and many more to come.
SEE IT NOW: In March 1999,
Garner was interviewed on-camera for the Archive of American Television. That candid and informative, six-part appearance is currently available on Google Video. Part one can be found
here, together with links to the other five installments. It’s not to be missed by
Garner fans.
I remember thinking Time After Time was a great flick, but haven't seen it in awhile. I've never seen Sunset, but don't remember ever being disappointed by James Garner's portrayals.
Malcolm McDowell always reminded me of something George Carlin said about cats... Cats he said, always looked like they were getting used to new contact lenses. I always thought Malcolm looked the same way... those kind of bloodshot, wide open eyes with deliberate blinks...
Posted by: Jennifer | Friday, November 17, 2006 at 12:49 PM
Love love love Malcom McDowell. I always thought he shot his career by doing Caligula, but apparently it didn't hurt Helen Mirren, so I don't know.
My favorite scene in Time After Time was when Wells walked into a McDonalds and imitated the redneck in front of him to order food. He picked up his fries, looked at them quizzically, and tasted one. His face lit up. "Pomme fritte!" he exclaimed joyfully.
Also, James Garner is not just an actor. He's a MAN. In all capital letters. I don't care how old he gets, he does me in every time.
Posted by: merciless | Friday, November 17, 2006 at 01:58 PM
Lance,
Watch Twilight to see Garner, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon in a well-modulated little film about getting old in a town where being young is so important. It might not be family night material, but it's a good movie.
Posted by: apocalipstick | Friday, November 17, 2006 at 02:22 PM
Funny... I haven't seen Sunset in an age, and I didn't even remember McDowell being in it(unusual, because he's one of my favorites as well), and probably wouldn't have remembered Bruce Willis being in it if he hadn't been on the poster, but Garner... the one scene that I remember clearly from the movie is where they're shooting the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and someone asks Earp (Garner) if they've gotten it right, and Earp remembers the way it really was... I won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it.
Jennifer--have you seen the remake of Cat People, the one with Nastassja Kinski and the Giorgio Moroder soundtrack (Bowie sings the theme song; that version is much better than the one on Let's Dance)? McDowell plays... wait for it... a werecat. Best thing in the movie, really; McDowell can sometimes be the only thing worth watching in an otherwise shitty movie, and frankly, he's done quite a few of those, as well.
Posted by: Tom D. | Friday, November 17, 2006 at 02:42 PM
Almost 30 years on, "Time After Time" is still one of my favorite movies ever.
And as the sadly canceled "Joan of Arcadia" showed, Steenburgen is still Teh Hot.
Posted by: Lex | Friday, November 17, 2006 at 07:20 PM
James Garner really was/is the picture of a pro. If nothing else, we owe him honors for The Rockford Files, one of the first private detective shows actually made for adults. (I mean, Mannix? Come on.) A terrific show, Rockford, the best of that wave of more comedic (and occasionally existential) PI fare that included Harry O and even Cannon, a show that dared you to disbelieve in an obese man's power to fight crime as well as anyone.
But Rockford! A man who often didn't carry a gun. Burdened with no-good ex-con friends. Drove a creaky old American road monster as big as a city block. Way above-average writing for the genre, but everything rode on Garner's likablity and obvious-yet-never-overbearing masculinity. And all those episodes of a one-hour show equal how many movies?
Malcolm McDowell.... he shoulda been a contender. How I wish that someone around 1985 had shaken him by the shoulders and declared, "You're Malcolm McDowell! Stop with this (&@(*^# you're making! No more Blue Thunders!"
Posted by: KC45s | Friday, November 17, 2006 at 08:49 PM
I'm with KC45s on James Garner in the Rockford Files. I loved it as a kid and have begun watching it on DVD again. As Rockford he can make his character believable as a self-centered coward and as a reluctant, but tough hero. You always believed that he might actually give up when things got hard, even though, he never did, of course. His relationship with Noah Beery seemed natural and tender as well. I will disagree with KC on Mannix though; I used to love that show, but maybe, it was more for the theme song and Mike Connors' hair.
Posted by: OutOfContext | Friday, November 17, 2006 at 09:29 PM
Love both Malcolm McDowell and James Garner. So have put "Sunset" in my Netflix que, not having seen it. I'd expected to not care for "Time After Time" so was surprised at how much fun it was, yet haven't viewed it but once.
Posted by: Idyllopus | Friday, November 17, 2006 at 10:34 PM
The Siren did an essay on how Brit actors aged; well, McDowell did well, unlike so many of that generation. Garner to me will always be part Bret Maverick, part Charley Madison. Get Emily for a family night.
Posted by: Exiled in New Jersey | Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 05:54 AM
James Garner has always been one of my very favorite actors. Wild, Wild, West was an absolutely wonderful show, because Garner made it so easy to suspend disbelief. And The Rockford Files was just awesome. Athough, I have to admit that I enjoyed them immensly as a child. It is notable, that it is one of the few shows that I really liked when I was a child, that I can watch now and actually sit through an episode or two, or more.
I definately think it is presence. I cannot remember the nae fo the movie, it was a bad one, that we went to see as a family in the mid-eighties. He was in substantial portion of the movie - but very rarely said anything. As I say, it was a bad movie - but worth watching, just to see Garner, saying and doing very little - but dominating the screen anyway.
Posted by: DuWayne | Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 09:12 AM
Absolutely agree about James Garner. He's been my personal hfavorite since the original Maverick in 1957.
I don't care how old he gets either - James is still THE MAN!
Posted by: MorganLvr | Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 05:05 PM
ditto on garner. always a great favorite. also enjoyed very much 1994s maverick, in which he played maverick sr to mel gibson's
maverick jr. they (and jodie foster) were magical together.
i have a videotape of tombstone/butch cassidy/maverick. whenever i get too sick of things i play it and am renewed.
Posted by: daveminnj | Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 08:07 PM
James Garner, "Murphy's Romance"...sigh.
Posted by: JD | Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 08:24 PM
JD -
I think that might be the one I was thinking of. Did I say bad. . .Ummm, well, I was only nine when I saw it. . .
Posted by: DuWayne | Sunday, November 19, 2006 at 07:30 PM
Lance, I've mentioned The Rockford Files here previously, though I can't quite remember why. Perhaps my all-time favorite TV show. Superb writing and then James Garner to make it happen.
I've never seen Sunset, and have not heard good things about it (until now). Perhaps I'll give it a shot anyway...
Posted by: Kevin Wolf | Monday, November 20, 2006 at 09:15 AM