Kicked In The Head With An Iron Boot

One of the pitfalls of the movie and television world is typecasting.  Play one character, one very memorable character, in one film or series, and the actor gets tagged as that character forever.  Nothing he or she manages to do in the future will shake that actor free of that character.  In previous times, typecasting was virtually a career-killer.  It made it almost impossible for a given performer to land another role or ever be taken seriously as any other person because of that one indelible image.  Such was the unhappy fate of Adam West, for example, who never escaped the role of Batman from the campy 1960s TV show, though in recent years Mr. West has managed to mine a little gold out of the joke his career turned into.  Some, like Jonathan Frid, who found the well of TV and film roles rather dried up after Dark Shadows, resign themselves to the fact and find refuge and career fulfillment on the stage.  Other actors, like Ken Curtis, embrace their fates: he cheerfully appearing as his Gunsmoke caricature in the years following the end of the series when he resumed his singing career (Curtis originally was a country music performer and starred with the Sons Of The Pioneers; not only a talented guitarist but also blessed with one of the smoothest tenor voices you ever heard, as showcased in the 1950 John Wayne cavalry picture Rio Grande).  But for good or ill, it is that one character, that one image, that sticks with that actor forever.

Usually, typecasting works forward in time, dogging the heels of its mark through the rest of his or her life.  But at other times, it works in reverse.

Just recently, Turner Classic Movies, for part of a day-long birthday marathon honoring George Sanders, aired the 1960 disaster drama The Last Voyage.  A credible film, though one that would also provide a lot of fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000, it stars Robert Stack, who along with his dutifully charming wife Dorothy Malone and Talky Tina prototype Tammy Marihugh as the cute but annoying daughter, wind up aboard Sanders' ocean liner that suffers an accident at sea and begins to sink under the weight of the movie's ponderous narration (reeled out with funereal pomposity by George Furness, who also appears as Third Officer Osborne).  As a disaster movie, The Last Voyage does have going for it the fact that the actual disaster takes up just about all of the movie's 91 minute running time and, rather than being interrupted by "character" moments, shapes and drives those moments, weaving them into the fabric of the scenario.  For the most part, the actors give competent performances, though not without some woodeness and cliche here and there, and the script spins out an increasingly important part for Woody Strode, a ship's oiler who decides to help Stack free the trapped Malone rather than stick with a doomed effort to prevent the ship from sinking.  And then there's Stack himself, who is certainly filling the shoes of the leading man in this cast as he becomes increasingly desperate to save his wife from drowning and is determined not to leave her even if they both go down with the ship, the S.S. Clarendon (portrayed in this movie by the famous liner Ile de France, which had at the time of production been sold for scrap and was used as the live location and main prop for the film).

The one problem, though, is that it has become impossible for me to ever take Robert Stack seriously in any film thanks to this:

Yes, Airplane (1980), one of the greatest movies ever made!  The hilarious and progressively bizarre parody of the disaster movie genre (very largely killing it in one stroke) from Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers which changed the career trajectories of Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Leslie Nielsen, features Stack in his signature role of Capt. Rex Kramer, the veteran pilot who has to talk down Ted Stryker (Robert Hayes), also a veteran pilot who served under Kramer in the same war.  He has to help Ted pull himself together and land the plane before the passengers and the ground crew at the airport completely lose their minds.

In many ways, Stack is funnier than either Bridges or Nielsen despite being, technically, the other "straight man" in this twisted story.  With perfect seriousness, he acts his way through scenes that come almost straight out of a Chuck Jones Loony Tunes cartoon; one of which in a reflective moment bends reality at right angles to itself when Kramer steps out of a mirror (accomplished with very clever staging, editing, the use of dual sets and reversed costumes, it remains one of the best visual tricks pulled on an audience in any picture, with a masterful theatrical simplicity that I'd stack up against any CGI gimmick any day of the week).

But now, Robert Stack, for better or worse, is Rex Kramer.  Now and forever.  Yes, he hosted the TV series Unsolved Mysteries in the 1980s and early 90s.  Yes, he used to be lampooned as his Elliot Ness character from The Untouchables by Dan Ackroyd in the 1970s.  But both are easily forgotten footnotes: facts for a new edition of Trivial Pursuit or a given answer on Jeopardy.  Because you can't look at Robert Stack without expecting him to be wearing shades and, underneath that pair, another pair of shades.  Or to step out of a mirror.  Or to be slowly going insane at a critical moment.  Or to ask a wholly ridiculous rhetorical question that has no application in any real world because stuff like that never happens.  Watch him in any of his films from the 50s and 60s and you'll see the ghost of Rex Kramer whipping off that top pair of shades.  Or, when Stack's on the phone, you'll be expecting him to order someone to pour every light they can on the field (then cut to the dump truck unloading a ton of lamps).

I will say it again: you just can't take a Robert Stack character seriously anymore because of Rex Kramer.  I mean, test yourself here and now with this still from Billy Wellman's 1954 air disaster drama The High And The Mighty:

 Which character and which film did you think of just now?