Ralph Meeker

I always liked him... liked his face, his strong voice, his overall presence, his acting.  On the screen he was generally a tough guy and could be found on either side of the law which is why he populated a few film noirs and westerns that I could usually be found attending.  At the same time I always detected a mischievous sense of humor in the way he approached his craft.  

Virtually nothing is known about his early life, which I always find curious for a famous person, but he was born in 1920 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  He was raised, however, in Glen Harbor, Michigan, and later Chicago.

He signed on with the military but injured himself a couple of month's afterward and that ended that.  He attended Chicago's Northwestern University where he was featured in his first play, The Doughgirls, in 1943.  He expressed his excitement for acting to the dean who told him it was an impractical profession and people who try it are usually not successful.  Perhaps the dean had forgotten the school's own Jennifer Jones, Patricia Neal and Charlton Heston.  At any rate, Meeker made music his major.

He gave himself a graduation present... a one-way ticket to Manhattan.  Never lacking in confidence, he planned to knock 'em dead on the Broadway stage.  He attended the Actors Studio and in a short time Jose Ferrer discovered him and cast him in Strange Fruit in 1945.  By the time he was one of the sailors in Mister Roberts in 1947, he'd become a typical struggling New York actor type.  He was a Brando clone, for sure... amusingly cocky, know-it-all, always talking about acting and getting hired, blue jeans, T-shirts with sleeves rolled up, cigarette hanging from his lips as his pontificated.  Definitely manly and handsome, before he could enjoy fame, he was enjoying his status as a Romeo.

Meeker was beyond ecstatic to take on the role of brutish Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1949) when Brando gave up the part.  Brando had brought even more to the part than the author, director or producers had considered, but now that they'd all experienced it, they needed to find someone who could deliver something approximately what Brando had.  It says something about what the Broadway community thought of Ralph Meeker and he enjoyed great acclaim in the iconic role.

Then Hollywood came calling... and why wouldn't they?  He knew someone who knew someone at MGM and he was hired on to make  movies with two of the studio's newest ingenues, both from Europe.  In Teresa (1951), which stars Pier Angeli, Meeker played a soldier-friend of the male star, John Ericson.  In Glory Alley (1952), he is a boxer who decides to leave the ring while he's on top and his ballerina girlfriend is the only one who supports the decision.  It's cheaply made and watching Leslie Caron perform ballet in a seedy bar is something I have never managed to unsee. 

On the other hand I have always suspected I may be the only person on the planet who enjoyed Somebody Loves Me (1952).  It was made at Paramount and Meeker and Betty Hutton played real-life vaudevillians Benny Fields and Blossom Seely in a highly-fictionalized, tuneful take on their lives.  It showcases a very toned-down Hutton and a largely miscast and uncomfortable Meeker.  

With Betty Hutton in Somebody Loves Me

They did not get along.  She wanted Sinatra for the role but he was having voice problems.  Hutton said that she didn't get on with Meeker because his singing was dubbed.  Puhleeze.  She didn't get on with him because he didn't put up with her martinet ways and likely because he seemed so second-rate after the dizzying thoughts of acquiring Sinatra. 

Perhaps his reward for putting up with Betty Hutton was his greatest acting coup of them all... the starring role of Hal in Broadway's Picnic in 1953.  William Inge's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is about a stud-drifter who wonders into a small Kansas town and sets the female hearts a-flutter.  It caused a sensation, a flurry of good notices and made Meeker and his costar Janice Rule the talk of the town.  There was only so much romancing they could do on the stage but they managed much more after the curtain came down.

When Paramount acquired the rights to the play and brought along its director, Joshua Logan, they also wanted Meeker to repeat his role on the screen.  But the caveat was the production company wanted the actor to sign a contract and he wouldn't do it.  Whatever his reasons he lost the movie role (which went to a miscast William Holden) and perhaps his chance to become a big movie star.

An amoral ex-soldier in The Naked Spur

As he was performing on Broadway, two films he made before heading east were released.  In both Meeker's notices were very good.  The first one, reviewed in these pages earlier, most western movie scholars would consider one of the best ever made, Anthony Mann's revenge oater, The Naked Spur (1953).  Meeker plays a dishonorably-discharged soldier who joins a bounty hunter in bringing in a murderer.

Jeopardy (1953) is a B noir (actually most of them were) and a good one.  Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan and son are on vacation at a Mexican beach when he gets his leg trapped under water.  Before the tide drowns him, she peals off in the car for help but encounters escaped prisoner Meeker at his scary best.  She begs him to help her  and he says he will if she meets his terms.

At the top of Meeker's best film performances comes Kiss Me Deadly (1955) one of the cult classics for noir lovers.  Director Robert Aldrich knocked himself out to achieve a look and a mood, bringing corruption and cynicism to the forefront.  The actor plays the screen's finest version of private eye Mike Hammer who picks up an hysterical woman on a dark, lonely highway with most unpleasant results.  It's a yummy thriller, a wonderful Meeker performance and with some great character actors in tow.

Another noir in Mexico comes in the form of A Woman's Devotion (1956) about a couple detained from leaving when the husband, a troubled war vet, is accused of murder.  The brass at Republic Pictures had been looking for something to team Meeker with his Picnic costar Janice Rule so the larger public could see how well they played off one another.  And the pair was looking forward to getting back together again. 

Director Stanley Kubrick thought Meeker was just right for the Paths of Glory (1957) as a soldier accused of cowardice in a harsh but affecting courtroom drama that is considered one of the director's greatest films and one of Kirk Douglas's favorite roles.

By this point Meeker was doing far more television than movies and he decided a series might be to his liking.  He signed on for Not for Hire in 1959 as an army investigator who handles crimes by or against the military.  Unfortunately it wasn't liked much by the public and lasted a single season.

By the early 60's, Meeker had gotten a bit paunchy and lost much of his hair which pounded the final nails in his leading man coffin.  He was still in demand in character parts but much of the work was in undistinguished projects or guest star roles in episodic television.  Still, his talent as an actor was always in evidence.

He began 1961 with a role as a small-town sheriff in the political drama Ada opposite Susan Hayward and Dean Martin.  He had a rare starring role in an odd film, Something Wild, an experimental artsy and occasionally creepy piece from writer-director Jack Garfein. His wife, Carroll Baker, stars as a woman who is saved by a man from committing suicide who then keeps her captive.  You know who played the man.  

With his youthful good looks and randy days and nights behind him, he decides it's time to marry.  He had been seeing fellow Midwesterner, actress Salome Jens, whom he had known from his earliest days in New York, and they exchanged rings and things.  Unfortunately the union only lasted for two years.

He had a small role as a military psychologist in the very popular The Dirty Dozen (1967) and was a psychotic Bugs Moran in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre the same year.  That was the last time I saw him in a movie although he would work in them for another 13 years.  His stage acting continued through 1971. 

While he made a strong presence in a few of his 50s films, his movie career never generated the excitement of his early promise on the Broadway stage.  When he turned to television, he became just another of hundreds of movie faces that popped up on the tube in largely inconsequential stuff.  His drinking, especially in later years, seems an indication of the disappointment, if not regret, from which he suffered.

In 1980, the same year he made his last film, Ralph Meeker suffered a stroke and was unable to work again.  He lived for years at the Motion Picture and Television Country Hospital in Woodland Hills, California until he had a heart attack in 1988 and died at age 67.

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A sentimental favorite