William Demarest--an appreciation

I grew up watching a lot of sappy versions of American family life on television, including the mildly depressing My Three Sons, starring Fred MacMurray, who was always better as a heel than a good guy (as Billy Wilder proved in Double Indemnity and The Apartment and MacMurray revealed in The Caine Mutiny). When William Frawley's alcoholism caught up with him, he was replaced on the show as the old mother-figure (it's hard to guess what was on the scriptwriters' minds by having the father a widower and an older man playing the mother-hen role) by William Demarest as Uncle Charley, who to me was just a scolding voice bleating out under a particularly bad toupee.

And I didn't know it, but in doing so I wronged an actor who turned in at least two immortal performances--in Hail, The Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek--as part of Preston Sturges's stock company. In those pictures he became the voice of demotic public wisdom. In the former, he played Sgt. Heppelfinger, who comes up with the idea of turning the 4-F Woodrow Truesmith into a returning hero, and then saves him when the truth inevitably emerges. In the latter, he plays a befuddled widower whose elder daughter has become preganant without proof of marriage, and whose younger daughter, it's hinted, will prove even more of a challenge to public morality. In both pictures he delivers Sturges's acerbic dialogue with impeccable timing, in a flat voice that manages to echo both the urban and small-town banter of the time. He is also a suprisingly adept physical comedian, as shown in Morgan's Creek, when he pulls a stunt I have only once witnessed in real life, when my mother tried to deliver a kick in the pants to myself and my sister--with the same ineffectual, but painful, results for the kicker.

Uncle Charley, I hardly knew ye.