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Nearing 91, Borgnine just keeps on rolling on screen
of TheColumnists.com
Ernest Borgnine has a big scene in his latest movie, The Hallmark Channel's "A Grandpa For Christmas" (9 p.m. Saturday night. Nov. 24), in which he crawls out of a hospital bed against orders to attend his granddaughter's stage debut in a school show.
When the doctor tells him that isn't the wisest thing to do, he grins and tells her, "At my age, sometimes the wisest thing to do isn't the right thing to do."
Well, Borgnine turns 91 in January, so maybe the wisest thing for him to do is to kick back and enjoy his remaining years rather than go to work on a tight TV-movie schedule when he surely doesn't need any more fame or wealth than he already has achieved.
But then Borgnine seems to be having so much fun in this first of the season's holiday movies for television that who can blame him? After all, he's the star of the movie, playing a beloved character. Once more it reminds all his many fans how far this fellow has come from those days when he did nothing but dirty, rotten stuff on the screen.
How dirty? How rotten? Well, most of us first met him in 1953 in the year's Oscar-winning Best Picture, playing "Fatso" Judson, the mean s.o.b. who put a knife in Frank Sinatra's gut. He was a leering fat slob who laughed like a nutcase while doing the nastiest things--like picking on a one-armed, white-haired man at a roadside diner in "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1954). Of course, we were all delighted when the one-armed man, played by Spencer Tracy, turned out to be an expert in martial arts and kicked the bejesus out of Borgnine.
The porcine Borgnine was the screen's No. 1 rotter until 1955 when director Delbert Mann cast him in the title role of a low budget United Artists film called "Marty," based on a television play by Paddy Chayefsky. Mann, who died this past week, once told me in an interview that he always knew Borgnine could play pathos even more convincingly than villainy and was delighted when he was able to cast this unappreciated actor in the role of a homely New York butcher, hoping for his one chance to find a woman he could marry.
Marty not only found his woman in that still marvelous little film, but Borgnine found instant fame, taking home the Academy Award for Best Actor of 1955 in the Oscar-winning Best Picture of the year. It changed his life forever. A few years later, he was the star of his own hit TV sitcom, "McHale's Navy," which entertained a new generation of viewers who never knew he'd ever been anything but a happy-go-lucky good guy on the screen.
I first met Borgnine in San Francisco in 1973 when he was touring on behalf of his latest picture, "Emperor of the North Pole" (aka "Emperor of the North"). In that action film, he'd returned to villainy to play a sadistic railroad "bull." As I suspected, Borgnine in person was a jolly, incredibly likeable guy and we both laughed a lot over the irony of the years he spent as a heavy, doing stuff he'd never even dreamed about doing on his darkest days.
Now, in his 90s, Borgnine doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to do, so why not play huggable characters rather than scare little children?
In "A Grandpa For Christmas," Borgnine plays a long-retired actor who's sadly estranged from his family. His ex-wife has died and he didn't even know about it. Their daughter (Tracy Nelson) was raised by her mother, who filled her head with stories about her father's irresponsibility toward his family. Naturally, her own daughter, 10-year-old Rebecca (Juliette Goglia), has a negative image of the grandfather she's never even met.
But when Rebecca's mom is seriously hurt in an auto accident and lapses into a coma, the authorities can find only one living relative who can take on the care of the little girl. That's right, you guessed it--an oldtimer who looks just like Ernest Borgnine!
The movie follows familiar Hallmark guidelines as Grandpa and Granddaughter learn to love each other while waiting for her mom to recover. It gives Borgnine an enormous opportunity to be nice for nearly two hours. It may be a bit schmaltzy for sophisticates, but Hallmark gives us plenty of reason to wade through it anyway as we watch Borgnine at his most engaging while surrounded by a host of former TV stars we haven't seen in a long time, among them Jamie Farr from "MASH," Katherine Helmond from "Soap" and "Who's the Boss?" and Tracy Nelson, the daughter of the late Ricky Nelson, who began her TV career as the snooty high school girl in "Square Pegs," then went on to play the nun sidekick of Tom Bosley in "The Father Dowling Mysteries."
Borgnine was never a lightweight, but he's now carrying a sizeable gut around. Still, I'd have to say he looks pretty good for a guy in his 90s. His voice is still strong and he's now a very rich-textured character actor who can do just about anything, but seems best when he's warming your heart.
Farr, who's now a white-haired 71, would never be mistaken for Klinger, the cross-dressing cutup he played on "MASH." Helmond, whose age has been reported somewhere between 73 and 79, has a certain preserved-in-wax look, but still is quaintly charming. Nelson, who's now about 44, still looks pretty good and certainly ought to be getting more work, considering her ability.
But Borgnine is the principal reason to watch "A Grandpa For Christmas." He's a survivor bigtime. Consider this--all the Best Actor Oscar winners from 1927 through 1958 are now gone except for Borgnine. He's the longest surviving winner of that award at the present time. And he's still doing first-rate work, as you'll see for yourself if you tune in for one of this film's many airings this season.
©2007 by Ron Miller. The photo of Ernest Borgnine is courtesy of The Hallmark Channel. This column first posted Nov. 19, 2007.
RON MILLER was a
nationally-syndicated television columnist from 1977-99 and is
a former national president of the Television Critics Assn.
He's the co-founder and managing editor of this website.
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