Jim Hutton

Jim Hutton seemed to have, at the beginning of the sixties, a serious shot at being the "new Jimmy Stewart" (for comedy, not Westerns.) VERY tall, gangly, and with a certain absent-minded lilt to his line-readings, he seemed to have the equipment to take up where Jimmy (in comedy) left off. Even maybe where Cary Grant left off (which is why its so fun to see Hutton playing off of the Great Grant here.)

Jim Hutton was also smartly paired with Paula Prentiss in a few M-G-M movies,starting with the silly (but sexual) "Where the Boys Are" in 1960. Hutton and Prentiss made a fine pair -- she was tall, too, and they seemed a nice Tracy-and-Hepburn match of intellectual equals. They had great voices, too.

But it didn't happen for Hutton. I for one was very sad to watch Hutton start to drop off the radar. He shifted to more and more supporting roles (two for John Wayne, including the infamous "The Green Berets"), and then the counter-culture revolution swept Hutton out in favor of the Dustin Hoffmans and the Jack Nicholsons.

Around 1975 or so, Jim Hutton was wonderful in an NBC-TV mystery show as Ellery Queen, playing the famous detective with all of his "eccentric Jim Hutton quirks" on full display. Hutton would turn to the camera near the end to tell us: "Well, I've figured out who the killer is. Have YOU? Be thinking about this clue..." And he was so natural when he did that, it felt like he was just talking to ME.

"Ellery Queen" was cancelled (It's creators said it was actually too hard to guess the killers, so they "dumbed it down" for "Murder, She Wrote" when they created that show.)

Jim Hutton sadly made a cheap horror movie "Psychic Killer" that was ultra-gory (Hutton NEVER should have been in such a film), and then more sadly still, died young of cancer.

It is of some irony that the late Jim Hutton's son, Timothy Hutton, won an early Oscar ("Ordinary People") and for a few years became the star that Jim Hutton was not. For son Timothy was a Standard Issue Serious and Sensitive Young Man, and lacked his father's eccentric likability and humor.

In any event, thanks to the immortality of film media, Jim Hutton left us a few movies and that great "Ellery Queen" show, which can be gotten someplaces.

I'd guess that "Where the Boy's Are" and "Walk Don't Run" stand as Hutton's most famous films, the latter because its Cary's Last. It's not that great a movie, but Cary AND Jim Hutton make it a lot better than it would have been otherwise.

[deleted]