Father Was a Fullback

In her memoirs Maureen O'Hara was not too kind to Father Was A Fullback dismissing it off hand as a stinker. It's not all that bad, not all that great either. At the point in time she was making Father Was A Fullback she was under contract to 20th Century Fox and doing a whole lot of bread and butter films like these, shot on a dime, that made money for the studio while Darryl F. Zanuck was giving prestige films to people like Linda Darnell and Gene Tierney. Maureen so wanted to get a prestige film at that time herself.

Seen today Father Was A Fullback has Fred MacMurray as a college football coach who's had a couple of really rotten years in the job and people are getting on his case. Chief among them is the officious Rudy Vallee who is a big mucky muck in the alumni and constantly offering advice on how MacMurray should do his job. I like his performance best in the film.

Of course as it turns out MacMurray should have stuck to football because he hasn't got a clue when it comes to being a father to teenage girl Betty Lynn and adolescent Natalie Wood. Betty Lynn who if you remember was Don Knotts's girl friend Betty Lou on the Andy Griffith Show later on, is the older girl who's got a bad case of Jan Brady. The boys just ain't interested she thinks. But Robert Reed would have NEVER handled the situation the way MacMurray does.

In fact that might have been what Maureen O'Hara finds wrong with the film. She has little to do here except criticize MacMurray for his bungling attempts to brighten his daughter's life.

A young gas jockey, Richard Tyler, inadvertently provides the solution to everyone's problems in Father Was A Fullback.

Sad to say though MacMurray does look like a dunce in this film away from the gridiron. It's an amusing enough film, just hardly near the top ten for any of the cast.

A college football coach goes through his roughest season both on the field and off in this light comedy. Fred MacMurray plays the kindly coach who has lost touch with his oldest daughter, Betty Lynn, and lost favor with the head of the alumni, Rudy Vallee. His wife, Maureen O'Hara playing much older than her actual age of 29 at the time, stands by his side as he stumbles through the rough times. Jim Backus is fun as their next-door neighbor, and Thelma Ritter adds some punch as their maid who always has money on the team that MacMurray's school is playing. Lynn is good as the teen caught up in angst and a young Natalie Wood plays his precocious youngest daughter very nicely. Overall, it's an amiable film, but underwhelming.

George Cooper(Fred MacMurray)is the losingest coach State U has ever known. A well meaning square fresh from Elm Tree High, his team has potential but is yet to win a game in this his first season, which will make or break him. Comic relief comes in the form of his family's maid who knows to always bet against his team, and two daughters: Natalie Wood as a scruffy tomboy spouting poetic slang in which I must say is her best role, and Betty Lynn(who in real life is actually only eight years younger than Maureen O'Hara)as an angst-ridden hormonal teen with no writers block nor lack of pubescent imagination when she secretly sends in a unique offing to "True Romance" magazine. Her true calling apparently does not help matters any, except when it turns out that Joe Burch, the ploy her parents use to bring her out of her shell, turns out to be a high school football hero all the colleges have been bartering for. He had been intending to go to the leading team school, but in the end decided State U, "to be near Connie...she's the first thing I liked more than a football...." Hurrah! The team now has an official starting star for next season, and George's coaching contract will be renewed. A Happy End.

I am so due to watch this film since I really enjoyed it the last time I saw it, which was almost 10 tears ago. I wouldn't think a cornball movie like this, one a lot of people today would think is stupid, would be enjoyable....but it was.

Here's another classic movie in which I enjoyed the corny expressions of the day. Usually I hear those most notably in the early 1930s films but there is lot of it here, too, many of them coming from little Natalie Wood.

Betty Lynn, playing older sister "Connie" to young "Ellen" (Wood), also is good in her kooky role. Fred MacMurray and Maureen O'Hara play the parents, "George and Elizabeth Cooper." This really isn't a football story, despite the title. It's a screwball family-type comedy, many of which I never cared for me, but this has good charm and humor. MacMurray is his normal likable self, as when he played in the early Disney films such as "The Absent Minded Professor."

Since MacMurray plays a football coach, there is some gridiron storyline in here, and it's unique because of the different-kind of ending regarding his team.

This movie has a neat twist at the end of it, too. Not well-known, I suspect, this is a true "sleeper," a fun family movie another era long gone.

Maureen O'Hara would have made any man a perfect wife. And she was -- we are talking strictly on screen here -- a good mother too.

This has a little to do with football and mostly to do with the growing pains of an adolescent girl. The actress who plays her did go on to TV. Here she is pretty unappealing. Her younger sister is Natalie Wood. I don't think I ever liked Wood in a movie made when she was an adult but she was a bewitching child actress. She sparkles here.

Fred McMurray does a decent job. Never a favorite of mine, he too had a major career in television.

What drew me to this was Thelma Ritter, always a delight. She plays the family's live-in maid. A lot of movies have maids, usually back-talking ones. Would a football coach at a state college, with a terrible team, have been able to afford what seems such a luxury now? It doesn't seem likely. But her presence is most welcome.