He probably would’ve been surprised to have been covered for the column before his uncle Wallace. Or even his father. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with his uncle Wallace—quite a noteworthy guy that we should get around to at some point. He was one of the earliest Oscar winners and one of the only people to have ever won it in a tie. Fair enough. His father was less noteworthy, though Mae West left him for Cary Grant in She Done Him Wrong. Still, we do tend to cover the older generations before the younger ones, just because it seems fair.
It isn’t that Noah Beery, Jr., made literally hundreds of movies and TV shows, exactly, including far more classics than his father and possibly almost as many as his uncle. But he did. In his earliest roles, he was uncredited in his father’s movies, but as time went on, he would make many, many familiar movies and TV shows. Only Angels Have Wings and Of Mice and Men, just in 1939. (Two of the six movies he made that year alone.) Two years later, Sergeant York. Red River in 1948. Rocketship X-M, costarring Lloyd Bridges and appearing on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Inherit the Wind. Perry Mason. The Littlest Hobo.
It isn’t the dozens of Westerns he appeared in even beyond Red River, though seriously, literally dozens of Westerns, both theatrical and for television. Depending on your terms, his Western career started with either The Mark of Zorro of 1920, when he was seven, or 1932’s Heroes of the West, when he was actually an adult. It then ran to the one-season show The Yellow Rose, starring Sam Elliott and Cybill Shepherd and airing in the 1983-83 season. And if many of the entries in his Western list are obscure, well, there are a lot of obscure Westerns in the twentieth century. Many others are highlights of the genre.
He also had your standard ‘70s TV career, after Westerns began to fade from popularity. Lassie. The Waltons. The Streets of San Francisco. Ellery Queen. The Six Million Dollar Man. Eight Is Enough. Moving into the ‘80s, we had Fantasy Island and Magnum, P.I. Trapper John, M.D., Murder, She Wrote, and The Love Boat. Again, lots of obscure stuff as well—Me and the Chimp? But it’s to be expected in any career as busy as his, and there’s definitely a sense of delight when he appears onscreen.
But no, it’s his episodes as Joseph “Rocky” Rockford on The Rockford Files. He wasn’t the original Rocky; there’s a different one on the pilot. I don’t know why there was the change, but I’m glad we had it. He’s a great presence on the show. He’s a great foil to James Garner’s Jim. Crusty and avuncular by turns, part of me will always regret never having had the chance to see the show I created in my head of Rocky running a foster home for troubled boys. It wouldn’t have worked in the ‘70s, given policies about foster parenting, but he would’ve been great at it.
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