Movies
After joining Jim and Marion Jordan (as Fibber McGee and Molly) and fellow radio favorite Edgar Bergen in Look Who's Laughing (1941) and Here We Go Again (1942), Peary finally received top billing for a brief series of RKO films. The Great Gildersleeve (1942) also carried Randolph from the radio cast to the screen, with Nancy Gates as Marjorie and Freddie Mercer as Leroy. Walter Tetley, who played Leroy on radio, could not be seen on screen as Leroy because he was actually a child impersonator.
Gildersleeve on Broadway followed, in 1943; the story is centered on Leroy as the odd boy out as everyone around him is falling in love. Gildersleeve's Bad Day (1943) followed the mishaps around Gildy's call to jury duty; and, Gildersleeve's Ghost (1944) brings Gildy's relatives Randolph and Johnson up from the dead to help his campaign for police commissioner.
Peary went on to continue his career (often billed as Hal Peary) in films and television well into the 1970s; he was especially active as a voice actor for cartoons produced by Rankin-Bass and Hanna-Barbera among others. He died of a heart attack in 1985. Waterman, who was a regular supporting character on radio's The Halls of Ivy while doing his version of Gildersleeve, died a decade later.
Read more about this topic: The Great Gildersleeve
Famous quotes containing the word movies:
“One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless.... They have put into practise the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The movies were my textbooks for everything else in the world. When it wasn’t, I altered it. If I saw a college, I would see only cheerleaders or blonds. If I saw New York City, I would want to go to the slums I’d seen in the movies, where the tough kids played. If I went to Chicago, I’d want to see the brawling factories and the gangsters.”
—Jill Robinson (b. 1936)