Of Bucket Brigades and Bridges

We had occasion to mention Lloyd Bridges (1913-1998) and his offspring yesterday — their family house was one of the casualties of the still burning L.A. fires. Lloyd’s birthday was January 15. I’ve mentioned Lloyd’s and his sons Beau (b. 1941) and Jeff (b. 1949) about a hundred times on this blog, and they seem sort of like the quintessential California family, so this seemed the ideal time to celebrate them.

Lloyd Bridges’ parents were native Kansans, but Lloyd was born in San Leandro, California, outside San Francisco, where his father worked in the hospitality business. At the age of three he won a fat baby contest (a common lark at the time) that was judged by none other than former President (and fellow fat baby) William Howard Taft. Bridges studied poli sci at UCLA, half intending to become a lawyer to please his father, but wound up discovering a love of performing. He also discovered fellow actress Dorothy Simpson, who became his wife and the mother of his children.

Believe it or not, Bridges’ first credits are as early as the mid ’30s! He had bit parts in two films in 1936: Freshman Love with Patricia Ellis and Frank McHugh, and Dancing Feet with Ben Lyon. He then moved to New York, where he was a supernumerary in Robert Edmond Jones‘ 1937 staging of a Broadway production of Othello. He and Dorothy were married the following year. The pair studied with Michael Chekhov, and appeared in off-Broadway and Catskills productions before heading to Hollywood. Bridges was signed by Columbia in 1940.

Bridges would accumulate over 200 screen credits in his 60s years of movie-making. Much of it is well known, though it must be said that very little of it was distinguished. I associate him with B movies and television. Occasionally he would make his way into decent films, but he seems unable to have built on those occasions to leads in prestige films. The fact that he had a family to support was surely a factor in all of this. Over a third of his lifelong credits are from the 1940s when he was slaving away in small supporting parts in routine programmers. Every so often you’ll be watching one of these obscure things, and all of a sudden Lloyd Bridges will pop up. Lots of them are westerns, crime dramas, and war pictures, but you can also see him in classic comedies, like Shut My Big Mouth (1942) with Joe E. Ross, The Heat’s On (1943) with Mae West, and They Stooge to Conga (1943) with The Three Stooges. Consider this roller coaster: in 1952 he was in the major western classic High Noon with Gary Cooper, and the all-star Thanksgiving snooze Plymouth Adventure. Three years later he’s in Roger Corman’s Apache Woman (1955), a movie that looks like it cost $40 to produce. Then the following year he’s in The Rainmaker with Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. Whiplash inducing!

Bridges didn’t have a good face for a leading man. His beady eyes were too closely set together and he seemed to wear a perpetual bemused smirk that made him resemble a comic strip character. A lot of his parts were stupid villains, smug doofuses, and henchmen. But he had a fine physique, and, as a result, was often filmed with his shirt off. I tend to think of him as one of Hollywood’s premiere AQUATIC stars. He wasn’t a competitive swimmer like Esther Williams and Johnny Weissmuller. Instead, he was all about the aqua lung. During World War Two and afterwards he served in the U.S. Coast Guard, and remained closely associated with the institution thereafter. His best known wet suit role was his starring part on the TV show Sea Hunt (1958-61). (I used to have a copy of his 1960 book Mask and Flippers, published at the height of his Sea Hunt fame). Other related vehicles had included Irving Allen’s 16 Fathoms Deep (1948), and such later things as Around the World Under the Sea (1966) and Scuba (1972). He also narrated the tv nature series Water World (1972-75).

After Sea Hunt, Bridges went on to star in an unbelievably large number of short-lived and forgotten tv series — it may well be a record. These include The Lloyd Bridges Show (1962-63); Rod Serling’sThe Loner (1965-66), which has been called “the thinking man’s western”, a rip-off of Airport called San Francisco International Airport (1970); the cop show Joe Forrester (1975-76) which was spun off of Police Story; the night-time soap Paper Dolls (1984); the journalism drama Capital News (1990); and the sit-com Harts of the West (1993-94). All told, he was a regular on eight TV series.

Bridges was also front and center in a high proportion of made-for-tv movies and TV mini-series, and this is surely how I first knew him in the 1970s, things like Haunts of the Very Rich (1972), Benjamin Franklin (1974), Roots (1977), How the West Was Won (1978), Disaster on the Coastliner (1979), The Blue and the Grey (1982), Grace Kelly (1983, as her dad Jack Kelly); George Washington (1984), North and South (1986) — and those are just the ones that interest me.

In 1980, largely owing to his early appearances in things like The Lost Flight (1969) and San Francisco International Airport (1970), he was given a prime role in ZAZ’s hilarious spoof Airplane!(1980), in which he uttered the immortal line “I guess I picked the wrong week to quit sniffin’ glue!” Much like Leslie Nielsen, he went on to appear in several similar spoof comedies, including Airport II: The Sequel (1983), Hot Shots! (1991), Hot Shots Part Deux (1993) and Jane Austen’s Mafia (1998). He was also hilarious in a couple of Seinfeld episodes as a macho old man who won’t stop challenging the younger men to strength contests and throwing out his back. This was one of his last performances.

This is just the other skein of the wet suit of Lloyd Bridges’ career, the steel spine of it, as it were. We come now to the next generation.

The ultimate (fictionalized) primer on the Brothers Bridges is the wonderful 1989 movie The Fabulous Baker Boys, co-starring Michelle Pfeiffer. It’s the only movie in which Beau and Jeff Bridges appear together. It’s surprising to learn that it wasn’t crafted especially as a vehicle for them, as it draws so successfully on their images. It had originally been cooked up by screenwriter/director Steve Kloves, inspired by the piano playing team of Ferrante & Teicher, a frequent sight on The Ed Sullivan Show. Bill Murray and Chevy Chase had been considered in the roles at one point, as had Dennis and Randy Quaid. When Jeff, the bigger star was approached he suggested Beau (far from a box office name at the time) and the combination proved to work magically. Beau’s character manages the act, and is a bit of a hack, insisting on a very safe repertoire of songs. Jeff’s character is the more gifted, and really wants to play riskier and more creative jazz, and is hemmed in by the restrictions. He also gets the girl (temporarily). Real tensions and animosities seem to bubble up in their performances, but so do real indications of affection and a strong bond.

Both brothers had started out as child actors, had been taught the tricks of the trade by their parents, and both even played piano. Beau, the older by eight years, was briefly a leading man but quickly found a niche as a character actor (especially after he gained weight). His over 200 credits include films like Village of the Giants (1965), Hal Ashby’s first film The Landlord (1970), James Frawley’sThe Christian Licorice Store (1971) with future Bond girl Maud Adams,Hammersmith is Out (1972) with Peter Ustinov, Sidney Lumet’s Child’s Play (1973), and the weepy hit The Other Side of the Mountain (1975). Beau was the lead or co-lead in most of those, and as you see, they are mostly with major directors, though few are well remembered. Well known stuff from the subsequent period included Swashbuckler (1976) with Robert Shaw, the all-star thriller Two Minute Warning (1976), Greased Lightning (1977) with Richard Pryor, the Oscar winning Norma Rae (1979), Stanley Kramer’s last film The Runner Stumbles (1979), John Schlesinger’sHonky Tonk Freeway (1981), and The Hotel New Hampshire (1984).

Later, TV movies seemed to dominate: he played the title role in Without Warning: The James Brady Story (1991), Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis and The Colonel: The Untold Story (1993), Richard Nixon in Kissinger and Nixon (1995), the title role in P.T. Barnum (1999), and The President in 10.5: Apocalypse (2005). He was in The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (1993) and the sit-com Harts of the West (1993-94) with his dad, and scores of other things down to the present day.

Of the three, Jeff Bridges alone achieved the respected leading man status each of them sought. He’s the best looking of the three, and the most gifted as an actor. Consequently, he has had to stoop to very little out-and-out junk. One of his few embarrassing turns is in the strange Burgess Meredith film The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go (1970). But right after that, he was cast by Peter Bogdanovich in The Last Picture Show (1971), setting the very highest of bars, followed by John Huston’s amazing Fat City(1972) and Robert Benton’sBad Company (1972).

For Michael Cimino Bridges did Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) with Clint Eastwood and the excellent, unfairly maligned Heaven’s Gate (1980). In 1975 he did two very different western comedies: Frank Perry’sRancho Deluxe with Sam Waterston, and Howard Zeiff’sHearts of the West (a very different one from the Lloyd-Beau sit-com). He starred in the 1976 remake of King Kong, as well as Disney’s Tron (1982) and John Carpenter’s Starman (1984) — an amazing piece of acting. He was in the last film of Richard Marquand, Jagged Edge (1985) as well as the last film of Hal Ashby, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986). He played the title role in Francis Ford Coppola‘s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). He reunited with Bogdanovich for Texasville (1991), then did The Fisher King (1991) with Terry Gilliam. (He later narrated his Lost in La Mancha in 2002).

In 1995, Bridges played the title character in Walter Hill‘s Wild Bill, and co-starred with Streisand in The Mirror Has Two Faces. With the Coen Brothers he did the iconic The Big Lebowski (1998) and the 2010 remake of True Grit. In 2003 he was in the Bob Dylan–Larry Charles weirdie Masked and Anonymous and the family hit Seabiscuit! Later stuff included the Marvel smash Iron Man (2008) and of course Crazy Heart (2009), a kind of climax to his entire career, where he got to trot out his singing and playing country chops and won a well-deserved best Actor Oscar besides. He too acts to the present day — his most recent picture was the third Tron sequel.

We send the Bridges big condolences today for the loss of that house!