Jack Benny...Thespian At Large?

[Jhammes]

Danny Kaye would star in the 1981 TV movie "Skokie",
George Burns would star in the 1982 TV movie "Two Of A Kind",
Lucille Ball would star in the 1985 TV movie "Stone Pillow".

These would be VERY different and dramatic roles for Jack's friends (to say the least) but are still powerful performances, and respectful to the intelligence of the audience. Definite departures from their worlds of comedy.

The RADIO and TV version of "The Horn Blows At Midnight" play to the studio audience, but the last fifteen minutes are unexpectedly poignant and still very effective. So...

Late in life, might Jack Benny have taken on an all out dramatic movie?
Would he have even been interested in such a venture?
Rhetorical question as only Jack would have the answer, still, he probably could pull it off.

[Yhtapmys]

I think Jack could have pulled it off. Aren't here quotes around from people who marvelled at Jack's acting, and said he was an actor playing a comedian?

That said, the movies you listed above weren't exactly defining moments in cinema history. To be honest, I've never heard of any of them.

The Sunshine Boys would have been interesting. Jack would have had a chance to do some dramatic and poignant scenes. Alas.

Yhtapmys
(listening to 15 Oct. 1950 show right now)

[Roman]

Jack's decision to do The Sunshine Boys shows that he was up to taking on a challenging role even at the age of 80. I think he would have done fine. Whether he would have been better than George Burns, no one can say. As far as I'm concerned, George Burns was brilliant in that movie. (The scene where his character talked about losing his interest in performing after his wife died carried a special poignancy, even if it didn't exactly mirror George's own situation). I liked him in most of his later movies, especially in the first Oh God! movie and in Going in Style. He was a very natural actor, never hamming it up or overacting. I think that Jack with his mastery of timing and his very natural low-key style, would have had success too if he had had the opportunity.

[Mister Kitzel]

Jack was working right up through the end of his life. It would be logical for him to be open to a good role in a movie.

[shimp scrampi]

Maybe this is heresy on the Jack Benny Fan Club Forum ... but I honestly don't think Jack was a great actor. With the -possible- exception of TO BE OR NOT TO BE, in Jack's movies he never really inhabits a role and convinces you he's anyone other than Jack Benny.

Jack was a brilliant performer and mastered his "Jack Character". I was thinking this question over and part of the reason the "Jack Character" is so successful may be that tension between Jack Benny, the real-life incredibly nice, warm, humble man, and the vain skinflint character he portrays. What I mean is that if Jack was a really great actor, and was convincing and realistic as this jerk character, he wouldn't be likeable. Because the "real" Jack shows through cracks in the "character" Jack, it is part of the reason why the character works so well and why he's so beloved.

So, perhaps the very fact that Jack was not the world's greatest actor led to the enduring success of Jack as a performer and icon?

[Roman]

I haven't seen most of Jack's movies so I can't say whether he was challenged with a role that required him to go much beyond the character familiar from his radio show (other than, perhaps, To Be or Not to Be). So it's hard to say whether he was incapable of taking on a challenging very different acting role. But the character that Jack would have played in The Sunshine Boys would clearly have been a stretch for him and would have answered this question.

I'm not sure I agree with shimp scrampi's assessment of Jack's acting abilities. People tend to underrate the difficulty of doing comedy. The skills that made Jack a successful comedian, his natural unaffected style and his amazing timing, are also invaluable tools for a dramatic actor. George Burns had pretty much only played his familiar vaudeville/radio character in his movies with Gracie in the 1930s but he showed that he was capable of far more when he resumed his movie career in the 1970s. Tom Hanks and Will Smith are two others I can think of who first achieved success in comedy before taking on roles that proved that they were also excellent dramatic actors as well. Like Jack and George Burns, Tom Hanks and Will Smith are very natural and likeable actors.

We'll never know if Jack would have proven himself like the others, or if he would have even desired such a second career. But I suspect that, if Jack had lived as long as George Burns and had the same desire to perform like George, he would have been offered at least a few of the roles that went to George. Perhaps, if events had gone differently, it would have been Jack, rather than George, who would have become our "Sexiest Man Alive," senior division champ.

[Yhtapmys]

I'm not sure I agree with shimp scrampi's assessment of Jack's acting abilities. People tend to underrate the difficulty of doing comedy. The skills that made Jack a successful comedian, his natural unaffected style and his amazing timing, are also invaluable tools for a dramatic actor.

Roman, on top of that, Jack managed to convince almost everybody that the cheap, age-sensitive, socially-inept character he played on radio was him. To me, that's effective acting.

Yhtapmys

[shimp scrampi]

I suppose it does depend on your definition of what makes a "great" actor. To be clear, I think Jack was great... but more along the lines of those actors who created a masterful single distinct personality - Cary Grant, John Wayne or Bogart were always basically playing a slight variation on a single core personality in most of their movies. Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles or everyone's favorite neighbor Ronald Colman could be far more chameleon-like. To me, the latter group are the "real actors", only insomuch as they do a greater range of "acting".

That's not to say one is better than the other, I think they're just two types of performers, each entirely capable of amazing an audience. Jack, I think, though, falls into the former category.

And, I think Jack might agree too...he certainly mined the humor in all those radio and TV episodes where he tried to horn in on the 'classy' actors.

Could Jack have risen to the challenge and taken on a totally non-"Jack" role? Maybe. Probably, even. But it doesn't seem like he expressed much desire to do so.

I remember at one point in the early '70s Jack briefly considered a new sitcom role in a proposed adaptation of "Steptoe and Son" - which of course later morphed into "Sanford and Son". Jack as Fred Sanford, that would be something to see!

[Roman]

I know that it's been said that John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart basically played the same character in their movies but I think that's not entirely fair to these great actors. Bogart's character in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca is very different from his drunken sea captain in The African Queen, the paranoid treasure hunter in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. I think that range of acting is as varied as any of the other actors mentioned.

John Wayne, while his range and work were less varied than Bogart's, also played a number of characters that were very different from each other. His warm modest mild captain in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon had little in common with the tougher, more hardbitten and cynical colonel in Rio Grande, two John Ford movies filmed just a year apart, or the grim avenger in The Searchers, another Ford movie. And the obsessed paranoid cattle driver in Red River had very little in common with the decent troubled boxer in The Quiet Man.

This is not to say that Jack had anywhere near the acting ability of Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne, much less Laurence Olivier or Orson Welles. But we would have discovered far more about Jack's acting talents if he had been able to take on the role in The Sunshine Boys. Perhaps he would have shown the world (and himself) that he was indeed a very good actor. Or perhaps we would have discovered that Jack was not an exceptional actor. We'll never know. But we shouldn't make conclusions on Jack's acting abilities based on Jack's generally unchallenging movie roles of the 1930s and 40s. After all, who would thought of George Burns as much of an actor if he hadn't decided to go back into movie acting late in his life?

[Brad from Georgia]

You know, thinking about it, I believe that Jack was a wonderful actor whose greatest---nearly his only---role was "Jack Benny."

[LLeff]

Maybe this is heresy on the Jack Benny Fan Club Forum ... but I honestly don't think Jack was a great actor. With the -possible- exception of TO BE OR NOT TO BE, in Jack's movies he never really inhabits a role and convinces you he's anyone other than Jack Benny.

I hear what you're saying, but here are a couple of challenges from Jack's radio work:

* Jack playing a martian in Suspense's "Plan X"
* (to a lesser degree, and per another poster's recent comments) The last 10 or so minutes of the Ford Theatre's version of "The Horn Blows at Midnight"

I think these are shows where you can, to a degree, lose yourself in the performance and separate the Jack Benny skinflint character from the one he's portraying.

This is going to sound like a non-sequitur, but just work with me here...

I've recently become quite enthusiastic about the work of Patrick Troughton. Classic Doctor Who fans know exactly who I mean. For non-Whovians, Troughton was a very busy British character actor with roles ranging from the first Robin Hood on television to Tyrell in Olivier's Richard III to Doctor Who to a wide assortment of supporting roles. Part of what really enchanted me about him was his ability to play goofy comedy and then switch back to drama and have you take him seriously all in the span of a minute or so. So I've watched about all of his Doctor Who work that I can get my hands on (waiting on a video of The War Game since it hasn't been released on DVD yet...doggoneit).

When I got my copy of "The Omen" (in which Troughton has a supporting, but prominent, role as a Priest), he walks into his first scene and immediately I'm wrestling with trying to not think of this as Doctor Who playing a Priest. Took me about a scene and a half, but I got past it. Unfortunately, he's only got about two and a half scenes in the movie.

I think part of seeing an actor as portraying a well-known role (be it Jack Benny or Doctor Who) is because that's how you're used to identifying them. Troughton himself said that part of the reason he left Doctor Who was so that he didn't get typecast. Troughton was a fabulously versatile actor, and his work in "The Omen" is just as good as anything else he did. But because I'm most familiar with him as Doctor Who, I had a hard time separating it. I think the same goes for Jack. We're so used to him being this person that we know so well, that even when you see him in any other role, though he may be playing it very well, you have a hard time disassociating from this character you know and love.

Was Jack as versatile an actor as Laurence Olivier or Russell Crowe? No. But a certain amount of his limitation can be attributed to the fact that all of us really just want him to BE Jack Benny.

[Brad from Georgia]

Oh, gosh, Laura, not to derail or anything, but Patrick Troughton died at a convention (Magnum Opus Con) in Columbus, GA, in 1987. I was a guest there and got to meet him on Friday (he seemed under the weather but very cheerful and outgoing), and then he died the following morning of a heart attack, if I recall correctly. Nice man, I thought.