Same Name, Different Face: Vans Edition

A couple years ago, before I really started watching a lot of classic films, I bought a book entitled The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger that explained how the studio system during the thirties, forties, and fifties designed movie star personas to such an extent that every aspect of a star's life, from their hair color to the people they dated, and certainly the roles they played, had to first be approved by studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner. In general, the book was very straight-forward and easy to understand, but I would occasionally find myself confused when Basinger would mention an actor named Robert Montgomery on one page, and then twenty pages later mention someone named Robert Taylor, and then twenty pages after that mention Robert Young, and I didn't know who any of them were, much less how to differentiate them by their last names alone. It wasn't until I started my big movie project last year that I learned to match actors' names to their faces and differentiate between them based on their careers and respective roles, so that if somebody mentioned Robert Young, I'd have some idea of who he was separate from all the other Roberts who were famous eighty years ago.

Most people don't have the time (or the inclination) to watch 125 old movies a year, though, so that's why I'm starting a new feature here on Cicada City Lights to help the roughly twelve people who read this blog learn the difference between some lesser known actors of yore: SAME NAME, DIFFERENT FACE. (Drum roll, please.) Every so often I'll pick two or more actors with similar names and do a little write-up for each of them, pinpointing the parts of their lives and careers that make them unique. Though most of the people I'll feature were quite famous in their own time, I'm going to focus on actors who are lesser known, and therefore more apt to be confused with one another, today -- in other words, I'm assuming that most people know the difference between Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn, and that if you don't, it'll be easy enough for you to figure it out.

My first selection, then, is the duo of Van Johnson and Van Heflin, who have been confusing people pretty much since Heflin's death in the early seventies, and maybe even before that. Johnson was definitely the bigger star, but neither was exactly a household name past the 1960s, and I'm guessing the average person today has never heard of either of them. Hence the need for SAME NAME, DIFFERENT FACE!

Van Heflin

Those who know Heflin today probably know him from the classic 1953 western Shane, costarring Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur. ("Come back, Shane! Come back!") As much as I like Jean Arthur, I've never seen Shane, due to the degree to which Alan Ladd creeps me out, so my exposure to Van Heflin instead comes from his Oscar-winning role in 1941's Johnny Eager, which he completely steals despite being billed fourth behind Robert Taylor, Lana Turner and Edward Arnold. Playing a cerebral gangster hanger-on, Heflin is like a bomb ready to explode in a film where the "TNT" is supposed to come from the combination of stars Turner and Taylor, yet anyone who's seen the film knows the real love story is between Taylor and Heflin. (I'm not just saying that for emphasis, either -- part of what makes Johnny Eager well-known today is the homoerotic tension.)

Heflin was never a true leading man, but he had a number of starring roles during the forties and became known for his intense acting style, which ran deeper than the typical acting style of the day and was somewhat of a precursor to the method acting of fifties' stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean. Heflin wasn't quite good-looking enough to play romantic leads, but he wasn't funny-looking enough to be a pure character actor, either, so when he got major roles they were often in literary adaptations like Madame Bovary and The Three Musketeers, and westerns like Shane and the original 3:10 to Yuma. He had little use for the Hollywood system and split his time between the stage and the screen, and was also an able sailor, originally taking up acting almost by accident. His last film role was in the 1970 disaster flick Airport.

Van Johnson

Van Johnson became a major star largely because of World War II. Thanks to a bad car accident that left him with a silver plate in his head, he was barred from serving in the Army and ended up simply playing soldiers in movies during the war years while many of the other male stars were off fighting. Tall and blond, Johnson looked both like a movie star and a regular guy, perfect for the WWII era, and he could play comedy as well as drama, and could sing and dance, so that when the war ended and the demand for patriotic pictures died down, he moved into an even more successful career in musical-comedies, opposite actresses like June Allyson and Esther Williams.

Despite sharing the same first name, Van Johnson was in many ways the exact opposite of Van Heflin -- he was more than happy to play along with the studio system, and he never delved too deeply into his roles, partially because he was never required to. He was exactly what his studio needed him to be, and he was exactly what his fans wanted him to be, until tastes changed and he wasn't left with much to do. Although he continued acting until the early nineties, his last major role was in 1954's The Last Time I Saw Paris, where he mostly acts as a prop for Elizabeth Taylor.

To say that Van Johnson is not one of my favorite actors is really just a nice way of saying he's one of the few classic movie actors that might make me avoid a film altogether. He's part of that late-40s group of actors who seem more like novelties than true stars -- Johnson with his boy-next-door appeal; Esther Williams with her water acrobatics; June Allyson with her over-the-top sweetness -- and thus he's somewhat symbolic of the type of old movies I don't like, and never have. I don't intend Same Name, Different Face to be a contest between the different actors featured, but I do often have my favorites, and in this case, I am firmly Team Heflin. I would encourage anybody who hasn't seen Johnny Eager to see it, especially for the scene in which Heflin's character comes thisclose to losing his marbles.