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remembers ROBERT STACK 1919-2003 |
 ROBERT STACK |
Grim, taciturn Robert Stack
was a lot more than that
of TheColumnists.com
If anyone had told young Robert Stack in 1939 that the role he'd be best remembered for at the end of his acting career would be Elliot Ness--a stoic, grim-faced lawman, I'm sure it would have cracked him up no end.
For one thing, Stack, who died of heart failure on May 14 at age 84, was a lively, un-stoic guy who loved to laugh in those days. Funnier yet was the "playboy" reputation he had after making his screen debut in Universal's "First Love," a romantic comedy with music in which he gave Universal's teen star Deanna Durbin her first screen kiss.
At the time, Stack was thought of as a light romantic lead--a sort of Hollywood pretty boy who played polo and seemed destined to portray nothing but shallow young fellows who walked into scenes saying, "Tennis anyone?"
Nobody gave much thought
to his long range career goals, including Stack himself. He seemed
to be cut from the same cloth as another screen hunk of his era,
Sterling Hayden, who had played a seafaring hunk in "Bahama
Passage" in 1941 to less than enthusiastic reviews, then
was pretty much written off as a bargain basement John Wayne
until he came back in his middle years in the 1950s. Stack was
thought of as a playboy whose main interests were dating beautiful
women and engaging in manly sports like polo and competitive
shooting.
And he was extraordinarily good at all of those things. Before
he ever appeared on the screen, for instance, he already was
one of America's best skeet shooters. He held a couple of world
records and is in the shooting Hall of Fame. When I met him in
1981, he was an advisor to the U.S. Olympic team for shooting
events. (His biography is called "Straight Shooting.")
When you realize how GQ
handsome he was in his 20s--and what a rugged image he projected--it's
easy to understand why Hollywood was interested--and why so many
of that town's most beautiful women flocked to him. (He married
actress Rosemarie Bowe in 1956 and settled down for good.) Still,
producers generally avoided putting him in action pictures when
he started in movies, preferring to use him as eye candy for
the ladies in pictures like "Nice Girl?," "A Date
with Judy" and "Miss Tatlock's Millions."
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in 'Eagle Squadron' in 1942 |
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It wasn't until the 1950s that Stack began to play the stalwart sort of heroes that would lead him toward the role of Elliot Ness in TV's "The Untouchables." The role that really made producers sit up and pay attention to Stack was in Budd Boetticher's 1951 "The Bullfighter and the Lady," considered by many to be the finest film ever made about matadors. Stack played a cocky American who gets a whim to fight bulls and trains under Mexico's greatest matador (Gilbert Roland). It's a grim and realistic film that made many people see Stack as a truly capable actor for the first time--and a mature action hero as well.
The following year, Stack was cast as the lead in "Bwana Devil," a truly awful picture, but one that nearly everyone saw because it was the first film in the new Natural Vision 3-D process, which started the short-lived 3-D boom in Hollywood. He followed that a year later, playing another action lead in 1953's "Sabre Jet."
Along the way, Stack and John Wayne had become friendly. Wayne had produced "The Bullfighter and the Lady," then gave Stack the key role of his co-pilot in his big budget 1954 airplane "disaster" movie, "The High and the Mighty," which became an enormous box office hit and further cemented Stack's credentials as a strong leading man. Then, in 1956, director Douglas Sirk cast Stack in the most challenging acting role of his career--the dissolute, self-destructive millionaire playboy in "Written on the Wind." Stack earned a best supporting actor nomination--and much new respect in Hollywood. (Dorothy Malone won the female supporting Oscar, playing his nymphomaniac sister.)
By 1959, when he played the title role in John Farrow's big budget "John Paul Jones," Stack was being accepted as a "name above the title" star in action films, but it turned out to be the year he accepted a television role he probably thought would be a one-shot deal--the part of racket buster Eliot Ness in a Desilu Playhouse two-parter called "The Scarface Mob."
That bullet-riddled drama about the Chicago underworld in the 1920s pitted Ness against gang kingpin Al Capone (Neville Brand) and was a huge ratings hit. That was in April and by the fall ABC had decided to turn the whole thing into a weekly series, based on the exploits of crimefighter Ness. Stack agreed to reprise the role--and the series ran for five seasons, permanently bonding him to the role of the tight-lipped, grim-visaged Eliot Ness.
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zeroing in on organized crime |
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As a lifelong gun-lover, Stack wasn't prepared for all the protests against the high level of gun-related violence in "The Untouchables." I didn't meet him until he was coming back to television with a modern crime series, "Strike Force," which hoped to duplicate the success of the earlier show. When I asked him about the violent rap against "The Untouchables," he was ready to rumble.
"I know what guns are for and I have a great respect for them," he said. He explained that he realized the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had created a huge anti-guns clammor in America, but he politely said, "I'm too damn old to switch around."
In fact, Stack said he had, for the first time, only recently begun to store his guns and their ammunition in his house because he feared the time he might have to defend his family.
Stack said the violence in the original "Untouchables" was justifiable because that series was "a sort of 'Godfather' of violence," but he agreed television had gone too far with violence in shows that weren't so artfully put together as his old series.
"Violence today is garbage," he said. "It's a crutch for bad writing. Violence is a bore, principally because it's not theatrical. Jeopardy is theatrical, but violence is after the fact--and it's always a bore."
By 1981, Stack also was used to the idea that he was permanently tarred with the Eliot Ness brush. He seemed to long for a time when people would remember all the other things he'd done, including several lighthearted parodies of his own image in films like "1941" and "Airplane!"
He said actors would rather play more rounded characters, rather than "walk around with a dead face and be Eliot Ness all the time." He said he didn't like being asked about violence and killing at every press conference or interview. He said he'd rather do something like "Little House on the Prairie" and have everybody love him.
His goal, after the acclaim from "Written on the Wind," was to get more serious parts that might challenge him as a performer.
"I want to do something that's called acting," he said, "with a stretch of emotions and a richness of thought."
Stack had very little luck finding those parts after his indelible success with "The Untouchables," a problem that many other actors have had to cope with in their lives. His biggest series after that one was NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries," in which he functioned primarily as a taciturn host. Still, he will be remembered, even if it's for something he never felt was his best work. And I guess that always beats being totally forgotten after such a long and fruitful career.
©2003 by Ron Miller.
The photo from "The Untouchables" is courtesy of ABC. The portrait
of Robert Stack is from NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries."
The photo from "Eagle Squadron" is ©1942 by Universal
pictures.
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