October 23rd | 4 films
Ninety-seven-year-old Dick Van Dyke has enjoyed an award-winning career, spanning seven decades, with performances on stage, television and film. His work has earned him a Tony, Grammy, Golden Globe, Daytime Emmy and four Primetime Emmys. In 1995, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame; in 2013, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award; and in 2020 he became a Kennedy Center Honors honoree. This month, TCM highlights four films from the 1960s, the height of his stardom.
Van Dyke began his career as a radio DJ and pantomime performer before he made his first network television appearance on Chance of Lifetime in 1954. Around this time a friend from the army who was working as a CBS executive helped Van Dyke secure a seven-year contract with the network as an anchorman for the CBS Morning Show. In 1959, he made his Broadway debut with The Girls Against the Boys and, in 1961, he went on to play the lead role, Albert Peterson, in the original Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie. Though the production received mixed reviews, the show won four Tony awards, including for Van Dyke who won for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
In 1963, Van Dyke began his movie career with a reprisal of Albert Peterson for the film adaptation of Bye Bye Birdie, which differed significantly from the play. Though both the play and the movie are rooted in the same central plot – the conscription of rock and roll star Conrad Birdie into the U.S. Army (inspired by Elvis Presley’s draft) just as he’s about to record a song for struggling songwriter Albert – the film was rewritten to showcase the talents of then rising star Ann-Margret. It added the title song for her and dropped songs originally sung by other characters. These revisions displeased Van Dyke and his co-star Paul Lynde, who was also in the original stage production, but the film was a hit. And Van Dyke was singled out for his performance. Variety wrote: “Van Dyke displays a showbiz knowhow far more extensive than his television outings communicate.”
The next year Van Dyke carried two roles in Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964): as an odd-jobber, Bert, who makes his mark as a chimney sweep, and as bank chairman Mr. Dawes Senior. For the latter role, Van Dyke was heavily costumed and credited as “Navckid Keyd” (a scrambled anagram of “Dick Van Dyke”). Van Dyke’s terrible cockney accent he put on for Bert has been criticized as one of the worst accents in film history, yet “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” one of the songs he performed in that accent, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In addition, Van Dyke received a Grammy Award, along with Julie Andrews, for his performance on the soundtrack to Mary Poppins. Funnily enough, humble Van Dyke never thought he sang well, recently joking “I’m not a good singer til this day!” However, his success in musicals proves otherwise.
Van Dyke went on to make several relatively unsuccessful comedic films in the 1960s (all while his highly successful television sitcom, The Dick Van Dyke Show, aired on CBS from 1961-1966). Among these films is Norman Jewison’s The Art of Love (1965) in which Van Dyke plays failing painter Paul Sloane who, at the advice of his friend Casey Barnett (James Garner), fakes a suicide to make his paintings more popular. Demand for Paul’s work soars, but it is Casey who becomes wealthy and begins to court Paul’s grieving girlfriend. The film has all the ingredients for a dark comedy and there are moments when it could have even been a Hitchcockian thriller. But The Art of Love wants to be lighter, and the jokes don’t always land. The Art of Love also stars Elke Sommer, Angie Dickinson, Ethel Merman and Carl Reiner.
Although Fitzwilly (1967) was likewise unsuccessful (described as “tepid” by The New York Times) it is quite a fun and clever Christmas heist movie. Van Dyke plays the titular character, a butler who hides from his elderly and eccentric boss, heiress Victoria Woodworth (Edith Evans), the fact that she has been bankrupt since her father died. Through schemes with his fellow servants, he creates one con after another to maintain the household. Notably, the movie features an early score by John Williams (credited as Johnny Williams). The film’s love theme and end credits, “Make Me Rainbows,” is Williams’ first collaboration with co-writers Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
Van Dyke followed-up with the now classic musical version of Ian Fleming’s fantasy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) in which Van Dyke starred as Caractacus Potts, a widowed father who wins the hearts of his children with an elaborate story about his oddball inventions, especially the family’s noisy car. It was a role that Van Dyke repeatedly turned down. In his autobiography he wrote, “The movie’s producer, Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, known for his tight-fisted control of the James Bond movie franchise, desperately wanted to re-team Julie Andrews and me after the success we’d enjoyed with Mary Poppins.” Both Van Dyke and Andrews refused, but apparently Broccoli finally convinced them by offering them extremely high compensations for the time period. Van Dyke also stipulated that he would not reprise an English accent for the role, and everyone happily agreed to let him keep his native American intonation! On set, Van Dyke often clashed with director Ken Hughes on the vision of the film – especially his revisions of famed children writer Roald Dahl’s parts of the script. “I know the film is beloved by many,” Van Dyke has said, “but for me it lacked the magic of Mary Poppins, which its producer had hoped to emulate.”
