Robert Maxwell and Fred MacMurray - 8 November 1991

The offspring of Czech Jews who died at Auschwitz, a new life in Britain, a Labour seat in Parliament, a man who implausibly teased a fortune from scientific publications, a titan in the old style. It's not often that the New York Times pays a memorial tribute to a tycoon, but last Thursday, these were some of the words that came from a sympathetic editorial.

Of course the circumstances of Mr Maxwell's death were so originally eerie, so much in keeping with the almost Hollywood myth that sooner of later envelops wealthy tycoons, that the death was the lead story on our nightly television news, as it must have been around the earth. I happened that evening to be in the company of a group of 60 or 70 doctors and hearing the complications in determining whether or not a person had drowned, did save me from the lurid and sinister speculations that some tabloids and supermarket give-aways were bound to advance.

My own reflections on the sudden, sad death of Mr Maxwell have nothing to do with pathology but with economics. The day after he died, the New York Times had five pieces, three on the management and fate of a financial empire, a confident listing of Mr Maxwell's huge assets and his huge debts, On following pages, by chance, there were two accounts of one giant American corporation and one giant bank which are both in dire trouble and two famous American tycoons who are in dire trouble. But, in the paper also and at night on the tube, there persisted joyful, seductive ads, commercials for these desperate banks and corporations, all telling you what gorgeous new bonuses and goodies they have in store for you, at practically no cost, just subscribe, just take out a card. Later you read that one of our famous tycoons owes $1.2 billion but is getting a new bank loan to float a $2 billion corporation.

These bewildering paradoxes threw me back to the only lecture in economics I ever attended. It meant nothing at the time but it begins to make sense now. It was 62 years ago in Cambridge, England, and it was given by the eminent John Maynard Keynes. All I remember was his saying, if you owe the Bank of England £100 and you leave the country, they will catch you and put you in jail. If you owe the Bank of England £1 million, they will put you on the board.

Talking of time and mortality, we can be sure once a month, more or less, of picking up the morning paper and reading a long, predictable tribute to some famous man or woman, to somebody who was generally admitted to be supreme at a single trade, writer, artist, musician. I suppose actors and actresses get more universal attention because they are supreme in what is the most popular and envied art, so there were no surprises in the processional columns devoted to Laurence Olivier or Peggy Ashcroft.

They were at the peak of their profession and so far as I've read, nobody discovered when they were gone, gifts, qualities, that had not been justly celebrated during their prime. But also, from time to time, a lesser actor dies and there will be no surprises in his obituaries either because we took the measure of him long ago, he became identified with one sort of drama or comedy or character. He has been classified and filed away without a second thought. Sometimes we're wrong and when we are, it's time to say so.

Fred MacMurray died last Monday in Los Angeles and in no time we were reading ample tributes that struck at once a similar note. Quote: the personable, unassuming actor who starred in some of the best film comedies of the 1930s and '40s and was later the protagonist in popular Walt Disney fantasies and in a long-running television situation comedy. Literally true, from the first fling with Carole Lombard in the 1935 Hands Across the Table, throughout the next 20-odd years he was among the most engaging, easygoing leading men. He was himself a type that probably never would or could have been a stage actor but he was made for the movies, that's to say, not an actor acting to a camera, but a human being happening to be photographed, unselfconscious, seemingly unaware of the camera.

By the way, in one of the last interviews he gave on television here, Laurence Olivier was asked if there was any one actor, actress, who stood out as the supreme film actor and he said quite quickly, oh, no competition, Gary Cooper. I think that same unawareness, a gift to behave rather than act, belonged to Fred MacMurray too, but to say that is only to analyse what everybody noted and praised in him. My point in bringing him up here is that in his 80-odd films he created one unforgettable male character that raised him, in only four films, into the top rank of quintessentially movie actors. That we look back on him now and forget or overlook this is probably nobody's fault but his own because it's true that most of his career was given over to light comedy, farce, playful fantasy, routine Westerns.

He was, in life, a very easy-going type: I take my movie parts as they come, I'm lazy in spurts, I am, I admit no great screen lover, sometimes scenes include people who just say hi, to indicate they're in love, I play those scenes very well. Such a type is not likely to press agents and producers to pick for him variations on a human type I think he played with genius, better than anybody in the movies, to take the type I have in mind to its extreme. Am I saying that MacMurray could have played Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment? He would have been very fine.

But the type I'm thinking about, the four matchless performances of his career were of, I was going to say, a recognisable American type. That's wrong. Say rather, a marvellously American representation of a fascinating, if regrettable, human male. An agreeable, suspiciously affable, off-hand fraud, a reliable insurance salesman caught up with a sleazy blonde and suddenly way out of his depth, in Murder, He Says. A businessman, philanderer, available at weekends to be, in a slightly shamefaced way, pimp of sorts – that was The Apartment. A nice cop turned crooked with the help of a woman, Pushover. And in the Caine Mutiny, the unforgettable navy lieutenant, the backer-up of his mutinous buddy who jibs when his own career is at risk.

It's interesting, I think, that of these one should have been written by Dymytryk, the son of recent Ukrainian immigrants and the best two, The Apartment and the incomparable Double Indemnity were both written and directed by Billy Wilder, a Viennese refugee from Hitler, whose mother and family died in concentration camps. Perhaps it takes a European, early acquainted with grief, to see the dark side of the country-club comic.

Anyway I'm sure in the next months or so you'll have an opportunity to see one or other of these, most of all I hope the rather heartbreaking performance of the insurance salesman in Double Indemnity, a plainly decent, dependable young man, tripped by one false step, a character tended and nursed throughout the movie with great art by Edward G Robinson.

During the week I brought up this side, this gift for playing heels with one or two American friends who remember the MacMurray movies reasonably well. I don't think they knew what I was talking about and I recall now, the only two critics who immediately recognised a supreme film actor in MacMurray were both Englishmen. The day the film came out in London, in 1944, James Agate wrote in his diary, this is a most magnificent murder story with the moral that a man and woman who put their heads together to murder her husband begin to loathe each other before the body is cold. MacMurray is surprisingly magical and touching, Barbara Stanwyck completely convincing, as the common, bloody-minded hussy.

The morning that the MacMurray obituary appeared at deserved length in the New York Times, I took out the usual film dictionaries, companions, encyclopaedias and what I read was what I'd expected. Gifted, off-hand, amiable light comedian, what MacMurray himself called smiley MacMurray, my decent Rotarian type. The humdrum foreseen pieces recall to me the one critic who spotted first this pervious character and put his finger with eloquent skill on the way it was played. The critic is David Thompson from his biographical dictionary. At he best, he says, what MacMurray is playing is a romantic lead built on quicksands, the hero, compelled to betray and the ingredients of the MacMurray man are paradoxical but consistent. Brittle cheerfulness, an anxious smile that subsides into slyness, the semblance of the masculine carriage that turns out insubstantial and shifty. A rare character, who lets the tawdry con man grin through the all-American wholesomeness with a rare conjuror's swiftness.

It's a pleasure to pay what I believe is the right kind of tribute to an artist who has had many tributes but most of them for the wrong things. In life, MacMurray was much like his comedy self, without the phoniness. More than acting, he liked to fish, paint, cook and play golf. For 37 years he was happily married to a former nun.

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