He was 92. Wow!
He was good in The Caine Mutiny as a setoff to Fred MacMurray’s weaselly officer character. What else?
I liked him in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.
Aw, my mom is going to be bummed…she always had a thing for him.
“The Last Time I Saw Paris” was a pretty weird adaptation of a Fitzgerald short story. Johnson was good in it.
Van Johnson to Lucy on I Love Lucy “The Dancing Star”:
“You’ll pardon me, madam, but you’re talking nutsy-cuckoo.”
I quote him, often.
Me, too.
Yeah, this movie, too. I saw it for the first time only a few months ago. It gave a terrific feel of an actual high-stakes bombing raid; at least, it felt quite realistic to me. In fact, now I’ve had some time to digest it, I think it’s one of my favorite WWII movies.
He was also great co-starring with Judy Garland in In The Good Old Summertime, a remake of The Shop Around the Corner. Judy was almost painful to watch, she was so nervous, tetchy, and flighty, but Van Johnson (unflappably calm, soothing, reassurring – almost like a human qualuude) was ideally cast opposite her.
I liked him in The Caine Mutiny.
Oh, gosh! We were just talking about him yesterday. I liked him in “Divorce, American Style”.
I haven’t seen many of his films, but I thought he was great in The Romance of Rosy Ridge (Janet Leigh’s first movie). The title is misleading. Like the guy at IMDB says, it’s a social issues movie, about conflicts after the Civil War. It has some of the most realistic country life scenes ever. They make hay in real time, and shingle a roof the way you’d shingle a roof. Excellent little movie. TCM plays it occasionally.
Huh. It looks like he was the last surviving principal actor of The Caine Mutiny, with only supporting actress May Wynn still around, at 78.
Which is the only reason I have a clue who he is.:smack:
He once appeared as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, playing music from Peer Gynt (an anachronism by about 700 years!) on a flute.
Absolutely. Damn, he was a great film actor. I can see his faults as a naturalistic actor, but he had 40s film DOWN.
RIP Van…he had a good life and a long career. Anyway, who was the guy who played the young ensign on the movie? Is he dead too?
I want to join most of the world in saying, “Van Johnson was still alive?”
Yep. Robert Francis made four movies and died in a place crash. He was the contemporary of James Dean for tragedy, but also a forerunner of Casper Van Dien for no-talent pretty-boys.
Also, he (Robert Francis) was being groomed by the studios to be the next big star, too bad his life was cut short.
Briefly worked with both he and Janet Leigh in a theatrical production.
They were both really nice people.
However, I read in the article that he was married, once, and was the father of a girl. Let me just go on record as saying I think the only way he could have fathered that child was with the use of a turkey baster, or one night of wild abandon. He might have been the ladies’ man on screen, but that certainly was not the case off screen.