I dearly loved watching him act and any film would do. But in 1958 he made two of the finest films I have ever seen. I have written about both of them. Not only did they appear in my 50 Favorite Films, they are in my top 10. He won a supporting Oscar for one of them but I will never believe that the voters didn't honor him with that prize for his work in both films.
Poet Carl Sandburg once called him the mightiest ballad singer of this or any other century although he poo-poohed such accolades saying that a true folk singer was one born to the soil, who remained in a rural environment all his life.
He was born into a Scotch-Irish tenant farm family in Hunt City, Illinois, in 1909, with a name that often brought a smile to people's faces when they heard it... Burle Icle Ivanhoe Ives. The youngest of six children, his first public performance was at age four when he sang at a soldier's reunion. He could thank his parents for his musical roots because they taught him folk music that had been passed down through generations of his family. By the time he was in high school, he had mastered playing the banjo.
With his girth it seemed a given that he would take to playing football and his goal was to be a football coach. He enrolled in Eastern Illinois State Teacher's College in 1927 as a physical education major but dropped out three years later to hit the road. A wanderlust overtook him and he could think of nothing else but traveling America's highways and byways singing and taking what odd jobs that came his way.
He learned to play the guitar and while learning myriad folk songs from hobos and others which he sang in various hamlets and camps on his journey. He often ran across folksinger Woody Guthrie and they teamed up occasionally to bring much-needed smiles to many sad faces. He would remember this time fondly despite being jailed for vagrancy and for singing Foggy Dew which authorities found too risqué. He would write about his experiences in a 1948 autobiography, Wayfaring Stranger.
By 1931 his travels ended and he moved to Indiana, obtaining his first radio gig. He also returned to school for a spell. By 1933 he moved to New York and enrolled in the Juilliard School. Five years later he made his Broadway debut in Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Boys from Syracuse. A year later he moved to Los Angeles with the show's star, Eddie Albert, with the intention of taking Hollywood by storm.
By 1940 he had his own radio show and in time would popularize such tunes as The Blue Tail Fly, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Holly Jolly Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, The Streets of Laredo, Lavender Blue, A Little Bitty Tear and scores more. Throughout his life Ives would record over 100 albums. He joined a folksinging group, The Almanacs (at various times Guthrie, Will Geer and Pete Seeger would be members) which was as much a political organization as it was a singing group. They were, among other things, opposed to America's entry into WWII. He performed a stint in the army, married and had a son.
Finally the movies came calling. Ideal for westerns, he made his debut as a singing cowboy in the Fred MacMurray-Anne Baxter horse movie, Smoky (1946). He soon made three more westerns, Green Grass of Wyoming and Station West, both 1948, and Sierra (1950). He was also kindly Uncle Hiram in Disney's 1949 So Dear to My Heart.
During the early fifties Ives was out of the movies for a couple of reasons. He was accused of having communist ties and in an effort to save his career agreed to name names before the HUAC committee. Such a move usually angered Hollywood but Ives seemed to come out of it all unscathed.
During that same time he was working steadily on Broadway. Director Elia Kazan (who did royally anger Hollywood because of naming names) hired Ives to join Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara and Mildred Dunnock in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. Ives originated the role of Big Daddy to great acclaim.
That same year Kazan also hired Ives for the small role of the sheriff in East of Eden (1955) and the following year he donned a rare suit and tie to cause Robert Taylor some grief in the excellent post-war romance drama The Power and the Prize (1956). Too bad more people didn't see it.
Ives was never more popular or more visible than he was in 1958. He played domineering fathers in the first three of his four films that year. Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms had its moments with Ives nailing it as a man with a young wife who has an affair with his son. Sophia Loren and Tony Perkins, unfortunately, were both miscast.
When Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was brought to the screen, there was never any doubt that Ives would again play Big Daddy. But he and Madeleine Sherwood as the greedy daughter-in-law, Mae (Sister Woman), were the only two who made the transition from stage to screen. Big Mama is played by Judith Anderson, older son Gooper is Jack Carson and Brick and Maggie, of course, starred Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. As the snarling, autocratic southern plantation owner dying of cancer, Ives is simply superb.
He rightly should have won an Oscar for this indelible performance but MGM insisted on putting him in the best actor category rather than best supporting actor. United Artists, on the other hand, was more sensible and correctly listed him as best supporting actor for his gripping performance of white-trash landowner Rufus Hannassey in my all-time favorite western, The Big Country.
Here is a clip from a scene I dearly love, one that is regarded as the primary reason Ives won his Oscar. Furthermore, he did it in one take. The other main stars are also in the scene, Charles Bickford (to whom Ives is speaking), Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons, Gregory Peck and Carroll Baker.
Wind Across the Everglades (1958) was not a great success but Ives gives a compelling performance as the renegade leader of a clique of bird poachers. Costarring is Christopher Plummer in his second screen role. Ives went on to play a judge in a story of a troubled teen (James Darren) in a Chicago tenement in Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960) and the same year was a mysterious refugee from Hitler in Our Man in Havana.
The Spiral Road (1962) has perhaps been dismissed as just another colorful Rock Hudson entertainment piece but it is far more than that. It concerns two doctors who treat leprosy in Indonesian jungles with the threat of black magic and western colonial high-handedness all around them.
Ives was a perfect actor for Disney fare and probably should have worked for them more. Summer Magic (1963) finds him as a small town postman who helps a Boston widow and her family adjust to country life. It doesn't hurt that it stars Disney regulars Hayley Mills and Dorothy McGuire and such handsome talent as Peter Brown and James Stacy and songs galore. It's not for everyone. If you need four-letter words, violence and car crashes, this is not the movie for you.
Ensign Pulver (1964) was a misfire although not a total loss. This is a sequel featuring the character Jack Lemmon won an Oscar for playing in Mister Roberts in 1955. Robert Walker Jr. tried his best but Ives was perfection as the crabby captain.
He continued to make movies through 1988. In several he simply lent his distinctive voice as an off-screen narrator and quite a few were movies directed toward children. Ives always loved kids and a number of times he gave concerts that were specifically for them. He also worked for years with the Boy Scouts.
He did much television in the last 30 years of his life, mainly as a singer on variety shows. He enjoyed a second marriage. Ives was really a dear man, never suffered from a swollen head, and was approachable. He always said his acting in his two best films was real good because he was not at all like those men.
He had smoked a pipe for many years, resulting in cancer of the mouth. He treated for awhile but ultimately decided it wasn't going to help. He died of the disease at age 85 at his Washington State home in 1995.
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