The Cliff Robertson Centennial

Born 100 years ago today: actor Cliff Robertson (Cliff Parker Robertson III, 1923-2011).

In preparing this post I came across a quote about Robertson to the effect that he “never became a major star”. Which seems a strange thing to say given that everyone knew who he was, he had a ton of high profile roles in famous movies, television shows, and plays, and won a Best Actor Oscar in 1968. I mean, how “major” do you have to be? But I sort of know what the writer means. In spite of good looks and lots of acting ability, he didn’t become a star at the level of generational peers like Paul Newman, Robert Redford, or Steve McQueen.

I chose the above photo from the 1962 Twilight Zone episode “The Dummy” obviously because it depicts Robertson’s most vaudevillian role, but also because it illustrates my theory as to why he wasn’t a box office matinee idol. There was something about him that read as dark, shifty, edgy, even crazy. Some of his best roles played to this strength (if you want to call it that). He was the unhinged young man who romances Joan Crawford in Robert Aldrich’sAutumn Leaves (1956), and later was at the center of such uncanny tales as Frank Perry’sMan on a Swing (1974), Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), and Michael Anderson’s Dominique (1979).

He also read as WASPy and entitled, which as Cliff Parker Robertson III, the son of Texas oil and ranching wealth, he surely was. (The fact that he was raised by his maternal grandmother and rarely saw his father surely fed the dark quality though). This element made Robertson well cast in political dramas, spy stories, or tales of corporate villainy, like Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (1964), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), Brain Storm (1983) and Escape from L.A. (1996).

Robertson had studied at the Actors Studio, so he also turned in a respectable component of stage work and dramas. His Broadway debut had been in a play called Late Love (1953) with Frank Albertson, Arlene Francis,Neil Hamilton, Elizabeth Montgomery, and Lucile Watson. The ’50s was surely his period of greatest hope to be a serious actor. In 1955 he understudied the part of Brick in the original production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and appeared in the screen version of William Inge’s Picnic. He played Val in the original Broadway production of Orpheus Descending (1957), and then co-starred with Piper Lauriein Playhouse 90‘s original version of The Days of Wine and Roses (1958, later remade as a theatrical film with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick). A 1974 made-for-TV remake of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was one of the last of these kind of roles.

Robertson also served in the Merchant Marine during World War II, which surely prepared him for his many war pictures, perhaps the most preponderant genre among his body of work. These films include the screen adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1958), Battle of the Coral Sea (1959), PT 109 (1963, in which he played John F. Kennedy, one of his best known roles), 633 Squadron (1964), Up from the Beach (1965), The Devil’s Brigade (1968), Too Late the Hero (1970), and Midway(1976).

A little known fact is that one of Robertson’s first nationally known roles was as the star of his own science fiction TV series, Rod Brown of the Space Rangers (1953). He also starred in the very first episode of The Outer Limits.

It is perhaps the lack of identification with any specific genre that hindered Robertson’s rise to the upper echelon of Hollywood stars.

He was The Big Kahuna in Gidget (1959). Comedy was not his forte, but he was also in such things as the teenage sex comedy Class (1983) and Penny Marshall’sRenaissance Man (1994).

While not identified with westerns Robertson played the villain Shame on five episodes of Batman (1966). He also played Cole Younger in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) and the title character in J.W. Coop (1971), a rodeo drama he self-produced and directed.

In addition to JFK and Cole Younger, real life historical figures Cliff Robertson played included astronaut Buzz Aldrin in Return to Earth (1977), Hugh Hefner in Star 80 (1983) and Henry Ford in Ford: The Man and The Machine (1987),

I am most interested in Ace Eli and Roger of the Skies (1973) in which he plays a barnstorming pilot with The Poseidon Adventure‘s Eric Shea as his son. Seems a kind of cross between The Great Waldo Pepperand Paper Moon, and was based on a story by Steven Spielberg! The film was badly recut by the studio, prompting most of the principal artists to take their names off the film. It was not released to theatres and has rarely been seen. Robertson climbed back into the cockpit for The Pilot (1980), directing himself yet again as he had in J.W. Coop, revisiting the theme of alcoholism which he had explored in The Days of Wine and Roses and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The Robert Zemeckis-Denzel Washington team-up Flight (2012) explored similar turf.

Which leads us to that Oscar-winning part, the title role in 1968’s Charly. I had a very good Junior High School English teacher who assigned us the story the movie was based on, “Flowers for Algernon” and the film used to be shown on TV from time to time, so I probably have a greater than average awareness of it, and it seems to have slipped from the public’s memory. It was the original role Tropic Thunder‘s phrase “going full [R word]” was coined to describe. (People seem to have become very sensitive about the word we once universally used to describe the mentally impaired, so I’ll abide by the contemporary convention). In this film Robertson plays a man with a very low IQ who undergoes an operation to make him super intelligent. The role was tailor made to demonstrate an actor’s range and Robertson pretty much hit it out of the park. Though, if you think about it, it wasn’t calculated to get him automatically cast as the leads in blockbusters going forward as he might have hoped and expected.

Ironically, Robertson may be most widely known today for his very last role: the part of Uncle Ben in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy (2002-2007).

From 1957 through 1959 Robertson was married to Jack Lemmon’s ex-wife Cynthia Stone. From 1966 through 1989 he was married to socialite and actress Dina Merill.