Kickback from The Professor: Hi Casey, Jamison and Working Detectives everywhere, I am enjoying the last few weeks of summer break at home before resuming university teaching at the end of this month. You will be pleased to know that I recently caught up on my backlog of WDDP and have suffered no adverse effects. As you know, this amazing result is consistent with the outcome of numerous clinical studies conducted for WDDP by real medical doctors (or at least men who wore white lab coats and looked like real medical doctors). Seriously, thanks for continuing to produce and broadcast WDDP. Your wacky and wonderful efforts are greatly appreciated by Working Detectives everywhere. Anyways, I just wanted to drop you a line to say hello. Also, on the basis of some scholarly research related to Jack Webb’s early career that was recently carried out by yours truly, I have decided to pose a fascinating question to my fellow WDs that occurred to me in the course of my in-depth studies. True or false, did Joe Friday ever dump a pitcher of cold water over Vito Corleone’s head? Well, this is not quite as bizarre as you might think. Considering that Jack Webb was ultimately typecast by television audiences as Sgt. Joe Friday and that Marlon Brando is best known by fans and critics alike for his greatest role ever, that of Mafia don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, then the answer is true. You see, back in 1950, both Brando and Webb starred together in The Men, a film that was set in a veterans’ hospital and followed the struggles of several paraplegic servicemen who were severely wounded during World War II. Brando plays Ken, an infantry officer who was crippled by a sniper’s bullet and is understandably bitter as he broods over his situation. Webb portrays Norm, an Army captain who was severely wounded during combat, but is also a highly literate (he quotes Hamlet) and very intelligent realist who has accepted his circumstances, albeit at times demonstrating more than just a little cynicism towards people and life in general (not unlike Joe Friday). There are numerous scenes in this film where Brando and Webb spar with one another. In one memorable part, Brando’s bedridden Ken goes off on a rant against another soldier in the hospital and throws a metal pitcher towards him. Webb’s wheelchair bound Norm, who is by now totally fed up with Ken’s brooding self-pity, wheels himself over to Ken’s bed and dumps a pitcher of cold water over his head, telling him to “cool off”. There is an interesting back story to all of this. When Marlon Brando starred in The Men back in 1950, it was his first Hollywood film ever. By this time, he was already nationally famous to theatre audiences, coming off of several years on the Broadway stage in New York, his last role as Stanley Kowalski (“Stella! Stella!”) was highly acclaimed by critics and celebrated by theatre goers, in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando disdained Hollywood and claimed that he acted in The Men merely for the money, although he never did go back to Broadway and instead spent the rest of his acting career in front of the cameras. Jack Webb, on the other hand, had never been anywhere close to Broadway or any other theatrical stage for that matter. He was a guy who cut his teeth as an actor on radio, starting as a talk show host with KGO in San Francisco back in 1946 and then quickly rising to national fame to radio audiences as cynical fast talking gumshoes in such radio noirs as Pat Novak for Hire, Johnny Madero Pier 23, and Jeff Regan Private Investigator. Of course, at the time that he was acting in The Men circa 1949, Webb would have already met Sgt. Marty Wynn from the LAPD and was in the process of birthing the very first episodes of his very own baby Dragnet on the radio. It’s hard to imagine two actors more different. Brando was an accomplished Broadway star who had spent years learning the famed Stanislavski system of method acting as a student in both The New School and Actors Studio in New York under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. Jack Webb, on the other hand, basically taught himself how to act reading from a paper script in front of a microphone inside a radio studio. However, it’s interesting to note that Webb’s performance in the many scenes he had with Brando in The Men is regarded by film critics as excellent, and the radio guy easily holds his own with the powerhouse presence of one of the finest actors who ever swept into Hollywood. I would definitely recommend watching this film to fans of both men. Finally, I don’t know how Webb and Brando got along with one another on the set during the shooting of The Men, but apparently Brando was extremely difficult during the filming, often driving his leading lady Teresa Wright to real tears. As a method actor’s method actor, he projected a dark and brooding presence to everyone around him as he attempted to define his character’s troubled personality. Furthermore, during rehearsals, Brando’s famous mumbling made Ken so incomprehensible that Director Fred Zinnermann seriously feared he would have to find another actor to play the part. It’s fascinating to speculate on whether Webb would ever have considered walking up to Brando during a break in the filming and asking him to act as a heavy in his new radio show Dragnet, although one shudders at the lengths to which a method actor such as Marlon would have gone in order to find the likes of William Harold Tanner or Henry Ellsworth Ross. In any event, such a scenario is doubtful. Coming from years on radio, Jack was into reading lines from scripts using clear enunciation and never would have tolerated mumbling. Of course, it’s almost impossible to imagine Brando reading from a script let alone a Teleprompter. I think it was Peggy Webber who once said that Webb had little use for any radio or television talent trained in method acting from The New School (or any other school for that matter). One has to wonder if his observations of Brando on the set of The Men had anything to do with his thinking. There you have it, the story on how the greatest modern American actor … whoops … make that the two greatest modern American actors … crossed paths in the early stages of their careers. Hope you enjoyed this. Feel free to use, edit or ignore as you wish. Take care. KMA 367
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 05:17:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015