The Name Is Garner (Obit by Bob Racine)

How does a motion picture actor become an embodiment of the peacemaker for his audiences over a decades-long career without the blatant use of agitprop or rash activism or pontification or exploitation and without in the slightest compromising his commitment to being entertaining, mostly funny and versatile?  How does he get away with being handsome and likeable but still a challenge to the libertarians and hawks among us?  If he were still alive, which he has not been since July 19, we could ask the one and only James Garner.  No, he was not a Shakespearian provocateur or a multilayered interpreter of complex, antiheroic, self-destructive, edgy eccentrics, a la Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, or Robert Deniro among numerous others.  He was just plain Garner with his own special, unassuming, unpretentious appeal.  He was quite the professional and quite the tender spirit, whatever mischief he got into on screen, and he got into plenty.

He had a laid back approach to the crafting of a hero, however dramatic the material.  You can trace his work from his big screen debut appearance in “Sayonara” in 1957 (at a time when he had already established himself in the iconic role of Bret Maverick in the classic TV western) to his most recent big screen contributions and you will be hard pressed to find any macho posturing or any grim faced steely tough guy swagger.  In that supporting part in “Sayonara” opposite Marlon Brandon and Red Buttons he was an American GI stationed in Tokyo in the early 1950s confronting his military superiors about the exclusion of Japanese women from servicemen’s social clubs, spurred on by his affiliation with a native show girl.  His character in “Sayonara” might have had a personal interest in the rights of the woman he was courting, but it sounded a note of tolerance much needed in the postwar world.       

 

In all the scads of movies he made in the following half century you will not find gory scenes, however much he collided with enemies.  You find a man who will go out of his way to avoid a fight.  He would rather con or humor his way out of confrontation than push his luck.  On one episode of “The Rockford Files,” he was wounded by an assailant’s knife.  Of course he recovered in time to sue for damages and to demand from the offending party an apology for which money would not compensate.  He had Rockford speak these words on the witness stand with great conviction: “There is no such thing as a small injustice.”  The conventional movie tough guy would never ask for an apology; he would be satisfied to take it out of someone’s hide or nose.  But not Garner!

I always enjoyed watching him, whatever the subject matter.  But there are three movies that stand out in my judgment in which he drove the peacenik   point home without having to play a pious crusader.  He demonstrated how a man can be dogged without being a do-gooder.  One was “The Great Escape” in 1963, a most exciting adventure about American prisoners of war during World War II.  He was again a serviceman, doing his sly part in planning for a massive breakout from a German stalag, the story based upon a true event.  He played the procurer, who knew how to find implements and materials needed in the escape’s planning and execution, most especially fake passports.  But unlike a few others in the bunch he was not hardboiled.  His was the friendly sleight-of-hand at work, and he cared greatly about his fellows, even assuming responsibility for a blind companion who needed guidance out of the country.  And late in the game, when so many others are congratulating themselves on their cleverness, he raised the question, after the enterprise ended in several deaths, whether it was all worth it.  He was a convincing advocate of good sense.  Again, his contribution was not contrived; he fit right into what was an entertaining, mostly tongue-in-cheek game of wits and imagination.  I have seen this picture many times – one of my very favorites among the oldies.

“Support Your Local Sheriff,” premiered in 1970, is a western about a small frontier town gone amok in the midst of a gold rush.  Garner is the unassuming stranger who takes the job of local lawman and cleans things up.  Sounds quite familiar, does it not!  Except that this one is played entirely – I mean entirely – for laughs.  It is a send-up of the standard horse opera, the likes of “Gunfight at OK Corral” and “High Noon” into the bargain, and if I were a betting man and had any way to prove it, I would bet my last quarter that the script was written with nobody but Garner in mind.  He may even have had a hand in writing it.  I cannot imagine anyone else doing justice to this cool character.  Yes, his sheriff is fast and accurate with a gun, but he uses it with great annoyance, with an exasperated intake of breath and a how- long-do-I-have-to-go-on-doing-this-tiresome-thing air.  In one scene, when an antagonist pushes a loaded gun into his face, he sticks his finger into the barrel of the gun and gives the guy a dressing down for being so reckless with a loaded weapon.  He acts as if taming the town is just a minor detail he has to put behind him, before he sets out to Australia, where he plans to make a home.       

But the one that has come to be recognized as the quintessential Garner and the one he maintained was his favorite until his recent dying day is an anti-war comedy with an outrageous plot, in which a fast talking, self-professed coward (want to guess who?) is hoodwinked into becoming a D-Day hero.  If any of you have not seen “The Americanization of Emily” (1964), I strongly recommend it as an ingenious serving of naughty fun mixed with pacifist parody.  There has never been a so-called war picture like it in my memory.  Some of the sassiest dialogue ever penned rolls off just about every tongue.  The other tongues include those of Julie Andrews as the young war widow he falls for, who takes pleasure in his snide assessments of the war apparatus; James Coburn as an officer who gets carried away with a hair brained scheme to carry out orders as well as his own sex-capades;  and Melvyn Douglas is the half-berserk general who comes up with that hero-making scheme that almost costs Garner’s coward his life.  Garner absolutely delighted in the picture, as did the American public, one that probably came close to giving John Wayne a stroke.

What is so amazing about his attraction to this species of movie is the fact that he was himself a man with an extensive military record.  He did time in the Merchant Marine and the Coast Guard before the Korean War broke out and he was pulled into Army combat.  Twice he was wounded, and twice he was decorated.  He had the background required to make his satirizing of the military mentality ring true.  He was not the artless, gullible outsider monkeying around with slippery feet in a domain he knew nothing about.  He had been there in the real struggle.  Apparently between his Army days and his induction into screen stardom he underwent a metamorphosis of attitude toward authority and the bloody business of the battlefield in which he had been schooled. 

Garner could also play romantic parts quite persuasively.  He had a notable success, both critically and commercially, with “Murphy’s Romance” (1985), costarring with Sally Field, and in his younger days he cavorted with Doris Day in “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling.”  And he could portray deep emotion when he wanted to.  In the TV movie “Promise” he played straight the part of a man trying to serve the needs of an emotionally disturbed brother (James Woods).  He actually shed tears in that one when his efforts to help proved fruitless.  His last appearance was in the movie adaptation of the bestseller “The Notebook.”  He not only attended the bedside of a wife afflicted with Alzheimer’s but lived right with her in her nursing home and served as an intercessor to their grown children.  He assumed that role passionately. 

Garner was never threatening or diabolical.  But he was no-nonsense, dead-in-earnest and tough-minded when the script called for him to be, and there were many times when it did.  He espoused the naturalistic school of acting.  So often you could have sworn that he was ad-libbing his lines, but the fact is every word you heard him speak came from the script; he knew how to make any dialogue sound spontaneous. 

Not surprisingly in his private life he was a paragon of peacefulness (except when he got hooked on racing cars and injured himself.)  He backed civil rights to the hilt, taking part in the 1963 March on Washington during which he had a third row seat listening to and supporting King’s “I’ve Got a Dream” speech.  Five years later he was in attendance at King’s funeral.  He gave liberally to worthy causes.  And not the least of his civilized accomplishments was staying married to the same woman for his last fifty-eight years and building a healthy home life.  You look in vain to find any blemish to his character – no scandals, no extramarital flings, no drunken orgies, no tax fraud.   Whoever said that Hollywood corrupts its devotees?  You do not have to look any further than the life and work of this winsome and amusing and generous man to be convinced that it does not have to be so.  I for one mourn his passing at the age of 86, and I will miss him ever so much. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.