For fifteen years at MGM Robert Young was the pleasant man in the doorway who did not get the girl. Freed from the contract, he found something harder and better to play, briefly, before television gave him the decent authority he was made for.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Captain Finlay in Crossfire (1947) and you see most of Robert Young's virtue and the whole of his problem. He is the detective in a film about a killing and the hatred behind it, and Robert Ryan does the frightening while Young does the listening. He listens well. He has a tired, patient face that takes things in without comment, and for most of the film's 86 minutes that is exactly what the part needs. Then the script hands him a speech about hatred and he delivers it as written, at length, and we were bored, we admit it, and started looking at the furniture. The writing did that, but he did nothing to fight it. He was a reliable actor, and reliability includes doing what you are told.
MGM signed him in 1931, out of the Pasadena Playhouse and a touring stock company, and kept him busy through more than a hundred films by 1952, most of them programmers. He was the good-looking man the studio could put beside anyone. In The House of Rothschild (1934) he is Captain Fitzroy, in love with Loretta Young's Julie and forbidden her, and the two of them are given nothing to do but look pained in doorways while George Arliss gets on with the film. That was the job for years: charming, decent, and somewhere behind the star's shoulder. Hitchcock borrowed him for Secret Agent (1936). Mostly he stayed put.
The contract ran out in the mid-1940s and he did the interesting thing at once. The Enchanted Cottage (1945) gave him a disfigured veteran, They Won't Believe Me (1947) a husband who lies, Crossfire a conscience with a badge. We have not reviewed the first two, but the pattern is plain: a face people trusted, turned to parts that trade on the trust. The darker work was noticed. Audiences, though, preferred the nice man, and said so by staying away.
So he went where the nice man was wanted. Radio from 1949, then Father Knows Best (1954–60) as Jim Anderson and Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–76) as the doctor everyone wished they had, calm and kind and never at a loss. Television found the use for Young that the studio never quite did. The patience that had nothing to do beside Loretta Young in a doorway was, on a small screen in a living room, the entire point.
He said once, "I invented that man you saw on screen. The moment I put on makeup and costume I became a different person. But he was never me." It is a thing actors say. From him it is worth believing, because the man he invented was so even and so complete that nothing of the inventor shows through. For the films, start with Crossfire, and watch him in the quiet stretches before the speech. Then find They Won't Believe Me and see what he did when nobody was asking him to be kind.
Biography
Robert Young (1907–1998) was an American film, television and radio actor. He played Capt. Fitzroy in The House of Rothschild (1934).
Young was born in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles as a child. He appeared on stage before signing with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1931. He appeared in over 100 films between 1931 and 1952, many of them B pictures made on short schedules, and co-starred with actresses including Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Hedy Lamarr.
Young later became known for his television roles as Jim Anderson in Father Knows Best (1954–1960) and as Dr Marcus Welby in Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–1976).
