He was known as Bob Cummings.  But for most of his film career he was billed as Robert Cummings.

That was his real name. Though he had tried names such as Blade Stanhope Conway and Bruce Hutchens – in early career efforts to pass himself off as either a Brit or a Texan (certainly not as the Midwesterner he was from Joplin, Missouri) — Robert Cummings was the name that stuck.

Hello again.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, back with more reminiscences about Hollywood of old.

He was never in the top tier of leading men, but Cummings had a long and successful career in movies from the 1930s to the 1960s.  AND he was one of the biggest stars on television in its early days.

His best features were for Alfred Hitchcock, 1942′s Saboteur and the 1954 adaptation of Frederick Knott’s mystery drama, Dial M For Murder. He was also featured in King’s Row. 

In Dial M for Murder he plays the straight-shooting Mark Halliday who spares Grace Kelly from her nasty husband, played exquisitely by Ray Milland. If you haven’t seen the picture lately, it’s definitely worth another look.

On television, Cummings was best known for his 1955 comedy sitcom, The Bob Cummings Show, which grew out of an earlier tube show titled Love That Bob. Rarely did a screen actor back then so successfully segue from feature roles into his own TV series.

In 1954, he won an Emmy for his role in a Studio One adaptation of Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men on CBS. Cummings even guest hosted the old Tonight Show on NBC after longtime regular Jack Paar departed and before Johnny Carson arrived.

Cummings was also known for his fastidious health regimen.  In 1951, actress Joan Fontaine recalled sharing a chartered airplane ride with the actor to Brazil.

The plane trip was uneventful except that Bob Cumming’s wrist watch would regularly resound through the plane.  He was a vitamin addict and took his pills every four hours, night and day, awakening the sleeping passengers, Fontaine wrote in her autobiography, No Bed of Roses.

Cummings, the god son of Wilbur Wright, learned to fly at an early age and by 17 had soloed. He became a flight instructor during World War II and remained active in the Air Force Reserves.

The ‘eternally youthful’ actor died in 1990.  He was 80.

Hello, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movie Guys, STILL wondering today about the possibility that James Dean’s legend as an actor is now considerably overblown.

(We first addressed that topic way back last Sept. 22 — via our JAMES DEAN – really a good actor? blog.) Well, on April 18 we received a response to that blog from reader Taru, who gently took us to task in thoughtful fashion.

Some backround: Indiana born, Dean’s truncated career in its early phase was spent mostly in television, taking various roles in several of those marvelous live-drama telecasts of Fifties. His Hollywood movie career began slowly.

The actor had un-credited bit parts in at least a half dozen comedies and dramas ranging from  director Robert Wise’s highly regarded The Day The Earth Stood Still to Sam Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets (both in 1951). Those were followed a year later by a bit in Deadline – USA starring Humphrey Bogart.

The pictures that made Dean were three:  director Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause with Natalie Wood (both in 1955) and George Stevens’ Giant, released after the actor’s death. Dean was nominated in the best actor Oscar category for the first and the third but didn’t win.

For our money, Rock Hudson walked off with Giant, handily out performing costars Elizabeth Taylor and Dean. It was pretty much all Dean’s show in the other two films although Kazan wisely surrounded the actor in his starring debut with an extraordinarily strong cast — notably Julie Harris,  Raymond Massey, Jo Van Fleet (who won an Oscar for her role), Richard Davalos and Burl Ives – in East of Eden.

Dean’s performances in each film are certainly competent, but unquestionably marred by Methody acting schtick that was considered at the time the mark of a truly serious actor. There is a self-indulgent, almost infantile aspect to Deans’s performances, particularly in Rebel, that’s off putting.  Some contemporary viewers might react by giving his character — and perhaps Dean himself — a swift kick in his pants with the admonition, Grow up!

Always an actor of force — which Dean was not — Marlon Brando seemed to get away with this type of thing. Dean does not. You wind up admiring his actorly touches from a distance rather than identifying with the characters he is playing.

One conspicuous flaw was beyond Dean’s control.  He was just too old for the parts he was required to play: an angry, alienated high schooler in Rebel and the “bad” teenage son vying for his father’s affections in Eden.  (Dean was 24 when he made both pictures.)

Taru disagrees agreeably:

Yes, I disagree, not that it matters.

To me, (Dean) doesn’t look out of place because he seems younger than his age, and of course, he’s relatively short. Dean’s performance in ‘Rebel’ is infantile because, well, that’s the way his character is; flailing and crying about.

What caught my attention is his ability to portray feelings in a way the audience is almost forced to identify with (even if they aren’t similar to what they are actually feeling). As you said, this is very different from Brando’s stoic quality.

In his last movie, ‘Giant,’ I’m afraid Dean isn’t very convincing as an oil miollionaire, partly because of the hideous makeup and his posture. Other than that, I think he did exellent job in all of his roles.

And people often tend to forget that Dean actually had a career in the theater before his debut in film, and most of the time he was praised profoundly, for his portrait of the Arabic ambiguous dancer boy in ‘The Immoralist,’ for example.

It is extremely hard to know how his career would have proceeded had he not died, but even if his major movies are otherwise hopelessly dated, his performances are not.

Thanks Taru.  We may have to re-think our original position.

Meanwhile, this Dean arcana from  the recently published Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, by Scotty Bowers with Lionel Friedberg. It’s a randy tell-all about Bowers’ gay and bisexual prostitution operation that began after World War II.

Bowers writes that he encountered Dean in various social contexts at various times in the Fifties, and declares that he was not only gay but a self-involved boor to boot.

If the guy pictured above looks like he just stepped out of a Noel Coward role, that’s because he actually may have.  That’s Robert Montgomery posing with his Cadillac Sport Phaeton on the MGM lot in the early 1930s.

At about this time in the actor’s long and distinguished career on many levels, Norma Shearer — who, as Mrs. Irving Thalberg, exerted real clout at the time at MGM — chose Montgomery as her costar in the 1931 big screen version of Coward’s play Private Lives. The career of the aristocratic-bearing actor, the son of rubber company executive who turned out at his death to have more debts and assets, was officially off and running.

Montgomery subsequently appeared in more than 65 movie roles, and directed several notable titles.  He also had a noteworthy career off the movie set.  He was twice president of the Screen Actors Guild (in the mid-to-late Thirties and again in the mid-Forties), and served in the Navy with distinction in two World War II combat theaters.  (Yes, he saw combat; no USO appearances for him.)

In retrospect, his SAG service may have posed more of a challenge since the big Hollywood studios were being shaken down at the time by two Chicago-bred gangsters,  Willie Bioff and George Browne, who had taken control of the powerful International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union and then blackmailed studio heads to preserve labor peace.

It was under Montgomery’s stewardship at SAG that the actors union took on both the studio heads AND the Browne-Bioff extortion racket. Actor (and later California’s U.S. Senator) George Murphy recalled that Montgomery went to a meeting with (MGM boss) Louis B. Mayer at his beach house in Santa Monica to discuss the proposed contract between the Motion Picture Producers Association and the Screen Actors Guild.

When (he) arrived, (he) found Bioff among the negotiators. Montgomery took one look at this character and announced that he would return to the meeting only after the ‘hoodlums’ had left. (Bioff would eventually land a lengthy jail sentence thanks in large part to a private investigation launched by SAG.)

In the Navy, Montgomery rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and saw action commanding PT boats in the South Pacific.  This stood him in good stead in what we believe to be the actor-director’s finest film, MGM’s They Were Expendable, costarring John Wayne and a radiant Donna Reed. John Ford is the director of record of this 1945 classic about PT boats in the Philippines although Montgomery is said to have lent a hand in the direction.

They Were Expendable is not just one of the best World War II movies ever made but one of the best movies ever made, period.

One of Montgomery’s misfires as actor-director was his foray into film noir in 1947′s The Lady In The Lake, in which he assumed the role of private eye Philip Marlowe.  The aristocratic-looking actor was wildly wrong for the part of the tough-talking gumshoe, and only the costarring presence of Audrey Totter — a stalwart noir femme fatale — makes this picture worth another look.

The actor is perhaps best known today for his Fifties NBC-TV drama anthology, Robert Montgomery Presents, a series of original teleplays plays that ran for six seasons.  (The show provided the springboard to the late Elizabeth Montgomery, the actor’s daughter.) Montgomery later became a tv consultant for President Dwight Eisenhower.

He died in 1981 at the age of 77, a class act until the end. Notice that in the above shot, the gorgeous car — try as it will — cannot upstage the classy Montgomery.