Peter Graves makes elaborate schemes seem manageable and foolish dialogue sound like responsible advice. We value that steadiness most when comedy puts it to work; in drama, it can leave the man behind the authority hard to know.
Fi1m perspective
Peter Graves plays Jim Phelps as though the difficult part has already been thought through and everyone can get on with the job. In Mission: Impossible (1966), his calm makes the team's elaborate deceptions easier to accept, even when their plausibility needs considerable help. We rate him for giving complicated television that reassurance without asking for much attention himself. Alongside Greg Morris as Barney Collier and Barbara Bain as Cinnamon Carter, he makes competence worth watching. Their composure persuades us to follow schemes that might look considerably less convincing with more excitable people carrying them out.
The early supporting parts include Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 (1953) and Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955). Graves replaced Steven Hill as Phelps in 1967, remaining with the original series until 1973. Hill's Daniel Briggs offers a more guarded presence; Graves makes leadership feel settled. The shift from supporting player to team leader suited an actor who could hold our attention through assurance rather than a display of temperament.
Airplane (1980) finds the comic use for that certainty, casting him as Captain Clarence Oveur. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker let Graves, Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack treat the emergency seriously while the dialogue gives them little sensible to say. We laughed at Graves's Oveur because he kept treating the emergency as a serious professional matter amid all that foolishness. He does not advertise how obligingly he is sending up his own authority. Some of the wordplay is painfully corny, but his delivery keeps even weaker material working.
His earnestness can look stiff, and Mission: Impossible does not always let us see enough beyond it. That is a limitation worth accepting for the ingenuity of the schemes and the cast's ability to make them seem practicable, though repeated viewing exposes the formula. Choose Airplane for the comedy; try Mission: Impossible when a carefully managed deception sounds more appealing than an intimate character study.
Biography
Peter Graves, born Peter Duesler Aurness, was an American actor. He played Ben Harper in the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter and Captain Clarence Oveur in Airplane! (1980) and its 1982 sequel.
Graves is primarily known for his television work, especially as Jim Phelps in the series Mission: Impossible (1967–1973) and its 1988 revival. His elder brother was actor James Arness. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 18 March 1926 and died in Los Angeles on 14 March 2010.
