by Stephen Vagg
Our piece in this series on Paula Prentiss covered the movies that she made with Jim (dad-of-Tim) Hutton such as Where the Boys Are (1960), which prompted us to give Hutton his own entry. Because, just like Ms Prentiss, Hutton seemed on the verge of becoming a star for many years without ever quite getting there – and also like Prentiss, it’s kind of a mystery why it didn’t happen.
Hutton was born in 1934, and seemed to have had an erratic upbringing, an excellent student who nonetheless found a way to be expelled from various schools and colleges due to behavioural problems (his parents broke up when Hutton was only young). He became interested in acting at college but was unable make a living out of it, so wound up enlisting in the US Army in 1956. This actually served as a boon to Hutton’s showbusiness career, as he found himself appearing in various army training films and founding an English-speaking theatre in Berlin, where he’d been stationed (it was a relatively “war lite” period to be in the army).
Hutton was performing on stage in Berlin – in a production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial – when spotted by director Douglas Sirk, who was making a movie in Germany, A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), an attempt by Universal to recapture the success of All Quiet on the Western Front (1931) (it too was based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque about a German soldier in war, only this time World War Two). Hutton wound up being cast in a small but showy role as a German soldier; this film is forgotten now – it launched the movie stardom, as it was, of John Gavin – but it’s quite powerful. Hutton also had a small part in the Robert Aldrich bomb disposal film shot in Germany, Ten Seconds to Hell (1959). So, there you go, actors – if you’re struggling, think about doing a stint in the army for a few years (if you can get stationed in places where they’re making movies, that is).
Hutton got out in 1959, and moved to Hollywood. It didn’t take him long to find work, as he was a screen natural: tall, affable, intelligent, slightly gangly, innocent but not dim, with a deep speaking voice, and superb comic timing – he was like a new James Stewart or Jack Lemmon, ideal for boys next door, gawky love interests, and/or junior officers/executives. He could play comedy or drama with finesse – an example of the latter is The Twilight Zone episode And When the Sky Was Opened starring Australia’s own Rod Taylor. Hutton was spotted by MGM talent scouts who put him under long term contract.
His first movie at Metro was The Subterraneans (1960) – a hilarious attempt by the studio to be “with it” and tackle beatniks with Hutton and Roddy McDowall as extremely unconvincing specimens of the breed. However, MGM then put him in Where the Boys Are (1960) playing the love interest of Paula Prentiss. The two of them made a splendid team – tall geeks in love – and ran away with the reviews.
MGM promptly reteamed Hutton and Prentiss in The Honeymoon Machine (1961), stealing the film from Steve McQueen and Brigid Bazlen, then Bachelor in Paradise (1962), stealing that film from Bob Hope and Lana Turner. They were both in The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962), Hutton’s first proper lead vehicle, but it didn’t do well – it’s not very good, to be honest, and various other films announced for the duo did not happen (Away from Home, And So to Bed).
Hutton starred with Jane Fonda in A Period of Adjustment (1962), based on a play by Tennessee Williams; it was a surprise hit. However, Looking for Love (1964) with Connie Francis was a flop – he was Francis’ leading man, only not, he hooks up with someone else, one of several reasons why this movie is terrible. MGM were apparently keen to cast Hutton in comedies, but he was getting sick of them and kept turning down roles (he has no credits for 1963). (He has a cameo in MGM’s Sunday in New York rowing a boat in Central Park – we wonder why he didn’t star in it.) Eventually, the studio released him from his contract.
Hutton then played support roles in two big-budget Westerns made for other studios: Major Dundee (1965) from Sam Peckinpah, which sets up Hutton’s character as a key player but he subsequently does so little that he could be cut out from the movie (it was a tricky production); and John Sturges’ The Hallelujah Trail (1965) with Burt Lancaster and Pamela Tiffin. Both films were box office disappointments, so Hutton went back to comedies with Never Too Late (1965) based on a Broadway hit about a middle-aged man (Paul Ford) whose daughter (Connie Stevens) and wife (Maureen O’Sullivan) become pregnant at the same time; Hutton was the son in law and it’s very old time-y.
Hutton was never less than excellent in any of these and Cary Grant personally selected him for the second lead in Walk Don’t Run (1966), which turned out to be Grant’s last film – an amicable entertainment, a remake of The More the Merrier (1943), which doesn’t have much of a reputation (in part, one suspects, because people resent the fact that it was Grant’s last movie), but it was quite popular. Apparently, he turned down a role in A Guide for the Married Man (1967), but he did play the lead in Who’s Minding the Mint? (1967), a cheerful farce that is a lot of fun – he plays a mint worker who destroys some money and tries to replace it; it’s kind of like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) only without the stars. Who’s Minding the Mint? was constantly on television when we were growing up, but it does not seem to have been a hit. Certainly, Mint marked the end of his stardom. Hutton said around this time that “everything came to an end. The telephone virtually stopping ringing.” The winds of Hollywood were changing, and Hutton had become unfashionable.
John Wayne came to the rescue with two offers. The first was the legendary The Green Berets (1968), where Hutton played the scrounger sergeant Petersen, who adopts an orphan Hamchuck and dies violently in a punji stick booby trap, leading to the memorable finale where Wayne assures Hamchuck that his Peterson was brave.
Wayne liked Hutton enough to get him back for Hellfighters (1969), playing a fellow oil-well firefighter. These were both big budget movies and The Green Berets was a sizeable hit, but Wayne was hugely unfashionable, and Hutton didn’t seem to get much of a career boost from them – they may have hurt his standing, especially Green Berets which caused the coastal critics to whip themselves into a frenzy of abuse.
We also think that in the minds of producers and directors, Hutton was associated with early sixties Hollywood rather than late sixties Hollywood. Because, from then on, he worked almost exclusively on television – guest starring on regular shows (Love, American Style) or TV movies (The Deadly Hunt, The Reluctant Heroes of Hill 656, They Call It Murder, Call Her Mom, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, The Underground Man), as well as starring in several pilots for series that were not picked up. He did appear in the feature Psychic Killer (1975).
Some of the TV movies are pretty good – Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark was remade a decade or so back in Melbourne – but Hutton was now firmly typed as TV guy.
“You can’t explain why things fall apart,” Hutton declared in 1975. “I know I looked too young for most leading roles. I still look 15 years younger than my age. And I’d been typed in light comedy. A lot of things contributed to my employment. It’s been a long, hard time. Knowing what I do now I wouldn’t have been such a blithe spirit in my MGM contract days. I was a friendly puppy. I hid the fact I had a brain. Truth is, I had too much success too young. I was bland, vanilla, the boy next door on screen and I carried it into my personal life. I took it all for granted. Now I want to succeed.”
Hutton’s son, Tim (the actor), later said that his father “started off with Where the Boys Are and he was asked to just be silly and not do a lot. Wear these silly hats and walk funny and always make faces. It wasn’t until Tennessee Williams’ Period of Adjustment, that he got his shot at doing something dramatic. But at that time, he had already done three Paula Prentiss movies, churn-it-out-fast films, that he couldn’t escape it. People only wanted to see him that way.”
Hutton’s career did perk up in the mid-‘70s when cast as Ellery Queen in a television movie and series of the same name. It was made by the team of Levinson and Link, who did Columbo, and only ran for a year but has a devoted fan base. These fans did not include the creators; Levinson later declared “the network liked Jim, and the head of television production at Universal liked Jim, and he was a very nice guy. It was a tough role to play because we made Ellery absentminded and kind of blundering. Jim didn’t have the energy.”
Link said, “Jim Hutton was a very sweet, very cooperative guy who used to take pride in how easy he was to work with. In fact, we used to say to him, ‘Jim, less cooperation and more charisma!” Producer Peter Fischer added, “As likable as he was, there was no engine driving the show there.” Fischer, Levinson, and Link say they learned from this when they created the more energetic Jessica Fletcher in their later, hugely popular procedural, Murder She Wrote.
Hutton returned to guest spots on television and was still working steadily when tragedy struck. In the words of Tim Hutton: “He called me one day and he said, ‘Hut’ — he always called me Hut — ‘are you sitting down?’ And he said. ‘I’ve got six months to a year to live.’” He died in 1979 of liver cancer, aged only 45 years old. It was very young.
Tim was one of Hutton’s three children; when he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1981 for Ordinary People he thanked his father in his speech. Incidentally, Hutton Snr had two marriages and a long romantic relationship with Yvette Vickers (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman), whose mummified corpse was found in a house after having been dead for almost a year.
Why didn’t Jim Hutton become a bigger star? He had talent, charisma, affability and appeared in some popular movies (Where the Boys Are, Period of Adjustment, Walk Don’t Run, The Green Berets). To get an idea of how good Hutton was, just compare him with people who played Jim Hutton type parts around the same time – Richard Beymer in Bachelor Flat (1962), Harve Presnell in When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965), Ty Hardin in Palm Springs Weekend (1963), Tom Lowell in That Darn Cat (1965) and even Warren Beatty in Promise Her Anything (1966). Hutton was better than all of them, in those sort of light comedy roles.
Admittedly, he didn’t always have the best material and some films that might have taken him to the next level underperformed at the box office (The Horizontal Lieutenant, The Hallelujah Trail, Who’s Minding the Mint). He never got the break that, say, James Stewart got with Mr Smith Goes to Washington or Jack Lemmon did with Mister Roberts. Hutton never enjoyed, either, a game-changing movie in a different genre that could change the way people thought about him, like (to use the same stars as examples) James Stewart did with his Anthony Mann movies or Jack Lemmon with Days of Wine and Roses. He seemed to have particularly poor luck getting a hit TV series (a medium that suited him) or really top flight directors. When he was under contract to MGM in the early 1960s, it seems that Rod Taylor or James Garner got priority for roles that might have suited Hutton.
One could argue that Hutton mightn’t have had what it took to carry a film on his own, i.e. to overcome bad material. That’s a gift precious few stars have, some of whom Hutton worked with like Steve McQueen, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant – Hutton easily held his own with all of them, he was a superb foil (he out-acts Lancaster in The Hallelujah Trail), but on his own, he never quite matched their screen charisma. In this perhaps he was similar to Bob Cummings – who was also a splendid foil for other stars but struggled a little on his own in movies. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The main problem with Hutton’s movie career is that he was overly associated with one sort of genre – light comedy – and a particular style of that light comedy – tail end golden era Hollywood, with its glossy photography, contract stars and sexual conservatism. So, his place in modern day light comedy was taken by newer actors such as Richard Benjamin and George Segal.
Still, looking back, Jim had a wonderful career in many ways. He found what he was meant to do in life and entertained lots of people. If his life was far too short, he left a rich legacy.
