Gary Merrill played the decent man told that his decency is the problem, and he took the news without raising his voice. Two good years at Fox, then three decades of steady character work; the two years are the ones to see.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the scene in Twelve O'Clock High (1949) where Colonel Keith Davenport is relieved of his command. Gregory Peck's Savage does the relieving and the film is Peck's, but the scene is Merrill's. He plays a man who loves his men and has just been told that this is why they are dying, and he does not argue and he does not shout. We found it hard to watch, because Merrill lets us see Davenport agreeing with the verdict before Peck has finished delivering it. That is what he did when given something to do: he played reasonable men absorbing bad news.
The voice helped. It was deep and cultured and had been noticed on radio before anyone filmed his face, and it made him plausible as a man with authority who would rather not use it. He had come up through summer stock and regional theatre in the late 1930s, then Broadway, including Born Yesterday in 1945, and the Army Air Forces, where he appeared in Winged Victory (1944) on stage and on film. By the time he signed with 20th Century-Fox in 1949 he already sounded like a colonel.
Fox used him well for about two years. After Davenport came Bill Sampson in All About Eve (1950), Joseph L. Mankiewicz's theatre satire, where Merrill is the stage director and the love interest and, in a company of people who can all talk, the one who talks least. Our review of that film does not single him out, and that is fair; Bette Davis and the script are the reasons to see it. But the part needed someone who could stand next to Davis and look like an adult with a job, and Merrill managed it. The same year he was Tommy Scalise for Otto Preminger in Where the Sidewalk Ends, and in 1951 a colonel again, Devlin, in Decision Before Dawn.
Then the parts got smaller and stayed small. War films, Westerns, medical dramas, a great deal of television guest work and a few series that did not last, on through the 1970s, with Mysterious Island (1961) among the more visible. He retired after 1980. "I had no drive, really," he said, and the career bears him out; nobody who saw Davenport in that office would have guessed it.
Start with Twelve O'Clock High, then All About Eve, and do not expect the rest to match them. He did not.
Biography
Gary Merrill (also credited as Gary Fred Merrill) was an American actor. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he attended Bowdoin College and Trinity College. He began his career in stage productions and radio, including a recurring role as Batman in the Superman radio series, before serving in the US Army Air Forces during the Second World War, where he appeared in Winged Victory.
Merrill gained prominence with supporting roles in Twelve O'Clock High (1949) and as Bill Sampson in All About Eve (1950). He was married to his co-star Bette Davis from 1950 to 1960. His later work included numerous films, television guest appearances, and voice-over work. He published an autobiography, Bette, Rita and the Rest of My Life, in 1988 and died in Falmouth, Maine.
