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:
“... in the movies Paris is designed as a backdrop for only three things—love, fashion shows, and revolution.”
—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)