Father Was a Fullback

In her memoirs Maureen O'Hara was not too kind to Father Was A Fullback dismissing it off hand as a stinker. It's not all that bad, not all that great either. At the point in time she was making Father Was A Fullback she was under contract to 20th Century Fox and doing a whole lot of bread and butter films like these, shot on a dime, that made money for the studio while Darryl F. Zanuck was giving prestige films to people like Linda Darnell and Gene Tierney. Maureen so wanted to get a prestige film at that time herself.

Seen today Father Was A Fullback has Fred MacMurray as a college football coach who's had a couple of really rotten years in the job and people are getting on his case. Chief among them is the officious Rudy Vallee who is a big mucky muck in the alumni and constantly offering advice on how MacMurray should do his job. I like his performance best in the film.

Of course as it turns out MacMurray should have stuck to football because he hasn't got a clue when it comes to being a father to teenage girl Betty Lynn and adolescent Natalie Wood. Betty Lynn who if you remember was Don Knotts's girl friend Betty Lou on the Andy Griffith Show later on, is the older girl who's got a bad case of Jan Brady. The boys just ain't interested she thinks. But Robert Reed would have NEVER handled the situation the way MacMurray does.

In fact that might have been what Maureen O'Hara finds wrong with the film. She has little to do here except criticize MacMurray for his bungling attempts to brighten his daughter's life.

A young gas jockey, Richard Tyler, inadvertently provides the solution to everyone's problems in Father Was A Fullback.

Sad to say though MacMurray does look like a dunce in this film away from the gridiron. It's an amusing enough film, just hardly near the top ten for any of the cast.

It took a total four screenwriters (Aleen Leslie, Mary Loos, Casey Robinson and Richard Sale) to adapt one exceptionally thin play by Clifford Goldsmith, a comedy about a losing college football coach and his nutty family in small town America. It's nice to see Maureen O'Hara again playing mom to precocious Natalie Wood (following 1947's "Miracle on 34th Street"), but O'Hara has distressingly little to do here except dote on exasperated hubby Fred MacMurray, the coach who sidelines himself mostly on the couch. The writing and staging are so mechanical you can almost sense the pauses for preconceived laughs, but nobody except Wood and Thelma Ritter (in another of her maid roles) gets anything amusing to say. MacMurray, as usual, looks like a Bassett Hound in a top coat, and older sis Betty Lynn takes an awfully long to bloom (she writes a short story about a teenage bubble dancer, which is funny until O'Hara gives her a solemn talking-to, spoiling the laughs). Jim Backus (billed as James G. Backus) is nice to have around as a neighbor, and Richard Tyler is a handsome kid who works at the gas station (his best line: "Mustaches--do you know how hard they are to grow?!"). The laugh lines aren't deft, though they are occasionally underplayed by the cast, and this creates a droll rhythm which makes up for the lack of any big scenes. **1/2 from ****

Maureen O'Hara would have made any man a perfect wife. And she was -- we are talking strictly on screen here -- a good mother too.

This has a little to do with football and mostly to do with the growing pains of an adolescent girl. The actress who plays her did go on to TV. Here she is pretty unappealing. Her younger sister is Natalie Wood. I don't think I ever liked Wood in a movie made when she was an adult but she was a bewitching child actress. She sparkles here.

Fred McMurray does a decent job. Never a favorite of mine, he too had a major career in television.

What drew me to this was Thelma Ritter, always a delight. She plays the family's live-in maid. A lot of movies have maids, usually back-talking ones. Would a football coach at a state college, with a terrible team, have been able to afford what seems such a luxury now? It doesn't seem likely. But her presence is most welcome.

I am so due to watch this film since I really enjoyed it the last time I saw it, which was almost 10 tears ago. I wouldn't think a cornball movie like this, one a lot of people today would think is stupid, would be enjoyable....but it was.

Here's another classic movie in which I enjoyed the corny expressions of the day. Usually I hear those most notably in the early 1930s films but there is lot of it here, too, many of them coming from little Natalie Wood.

Betty Lynn, playing older sister "Connie" to young "Ellen" (Wood), also is good in her kooky role. Fred MacMurray and Maureen O'Hara play the parents, "George and Elizabeth Cooper." This really isn't a football story, despite the title. It's a screwball family-type comedy, many of which I never cared for me, but this has good charm and humor. MacMurray is his normal likable self, as when he played in the early Disney films such as "The Absent Minded Professor."

Since MacMurray plays a football coach, there is some gridiron storyline in here, and it's unique because of the different-kind of ending regarding his team.

This movie has a neat twist at the end of it, too. Not well-known, I suspect, this is a true "sleeper," a fun family movie another era long gone.

Fred MacMurray is George Cooper--the coach of State's football team. They are having a horrible season and everyone seems to be second- guessing him...and he's worried that he'll soon be out of a job. In the midst of this, his teenage daughter, Connie (Betty Lynn*) is driving him crazy. The girl is unbelievably emotional and walks about in a Goth-like funk feeling sorry for herself. When George tries to help, he only makes things worse. The maid says he should just 'belt her one'! And, when you see how annoying (too annoying) she is, you kind of wish he'd take the maid's advice! Among the kooky antics involving the daughter are an attempt to create a fake boyfriend to pick up her spirits as well as Connie writing an article about teenage pregnancy...and her parents think she is pregnant. The antics, at times, seem straight from a second-rate sitcom--which is a shame as the rest of the film is much more enjoyable. The 'bubble dancer' portion involving Connie is kind of funny as is the aftermath.

Overall, the film is slight and enjoyable but occasionally the writing lets down the actors--with ridiculous situations and a character (Connie) who is much more of a caricature than a realistic person. Worth watching but don't rush to do so. Fred MacMurray, Natalie Wood and Maureen O'Hara have simply done better films.

*Betty Lynn is best known as Barney Fife's girlfriend, Thelma Lou, from "The Andy Griffith Show". Here, she is considerably younger and her part is incredibly poorly written. Poor Ms. Lynn!