The Too Few Films of Philip Coolidge

A celebration today of stage and screen actor Philip Coolidge (1908-1967).

The photo above is of course from William Castle’s The Tingler(1959), one of a handful of well known movies the character actor appeared in, some of the others being Hitchcock’sNorth by Northwest (1959), Gene Kelly’s adaptation of Inherit the Wind (1960), Dick Clark’sBecause They’re Young, George Stevens’The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and the comedy classic The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966). Most of his other 70-odd screen credits were in television.

Coolidge was above a man of the theatre. Like his fellow Coolidges Calvin and Jennifer, he was from Massachusetts, so I’m going to go ahead and irresponsibly speculate that there’s some kind of genetic relation, and frankly I don’t care to be informed what the truth is. He started out acting with stock companies in Boston, and later Chicago, finally gaining fame for creating the role of Simon Stimson in the original Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), followed by the same playwright’s The Merchant of Yonkers (which later was adapted into Hello, Dolly) the same year. His 20 Broadway credits also included Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1945, later adapted into a Danny Kaye movie), Sidney Kingsley’s Darkness at Noon (1951), Arthur Miller’sThe Crucible (1953), the musical Kismet (1953), Gore Vidal’s A Visit to a Small Planet (1957), Ionesco’sRhinoceros (1961), and (as Polonius) in the Richard Burton Hamlet (1964).

With plays like that to act in, why do film? But he did dabble in it anyway. His first was Elia Kazan’s noir classic Boomerang (1947); his last was Disney’sNever a Dull Moment (1968), released posthumously.