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Biography: Jack Oakie

The parents of American actor Jack Oakie had hopes that their son would enter the business world, but a spell as telephone clerk in a brokerage house convinced Oakie to look elsewhere for a career. After appearing at an amateur show staged by Wall Street executives for the Cardiac Society, Oakie was encouraged by the show's director to give acting his full attention. Oakie's professional debut was in the chorus of the 1922 George M. Cohan musical Little Nellie Kelly. Several Broadway productions later, Oakie travelled westward to try his luck in films, the first of which was Finders Keepers. Transferring without a hitch to talkies, Oakie found himself much in demand, usually playing a dimwitted braggart (with one of the best "double takes" in the business) who somehow made good and got the girl before fadeout time. By the late 1930s Oakie's career had gone into decline. The experience humbled the bombastic comedian and convinced him take a new approach to his career. After his unforgettable Mussolini take-off in Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), Oakie entered a new movie phase as second lead and character actor, which sustained him through many a musical comedy of the 1940s. And when called upon to do so, he could still carry a picture with finesse, as witness the 1945 fantasy That's the Spirit. Stage and TV work took up much of his time in the 1950s and 1960s, with occasional choice character parts in such films as The Rat Race (1960) and Lover Come Back (1962). Unpredictable in his likes and dislikes, Oakie was the sort of fellow who brusquely shooed away autograph seekers, but who also visited ailing comedian Stan Laurel, a man Oakie barely knew, to brighten up Stan's hospital stay at a time when some of Laurel's "close" pals didn't want to show up. Just before his death, Jack Oakie committed his memories to a sometimes fanciful but always entertaining biography, Jack Oakie's Double Takes, which was published posthumously by Jack's widow, actress Victoria Horne. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide less

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Lover Come Back (1961)
Cast: Rock Hudson Doris Day
Tags: Satire Sex Comedy Romance Workplace Comedy Romantic Comedy Comedy
Length: 107min
Although not as well known as Pillow Talk (1959), this romantic-comedy pairing of stars Rock Hudson and Doris Day earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Hudson stars as Jerry Webster, a Madison Avenue advertising executive who has achieved...
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The Rat Race (1960)
Cast: Tony Curtis Debbie Reynolds
Tags: Romance Comedy Romantic Comedy
Length: 105min
A somewhat uneven but still entertaining comedy-drama, The Rat Race, by director Robert Mulligan, co-stars Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds as Peter Hammond, Jr. and Peggy Brown, two performers who meet in New York and are thrown together by their...
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The Wonderful Country (1959)
Cast: Robert Mitchum
Tags: Traditional Western Western
Length: 96min
Although a mood of melancholy or worse pervades this excellent western, it remains an honest and hard-hitting look at the realistic adventures of Martin Brady (Robert Mitchum -- who produced). Brady fled to Mexico while still quite young in order to...
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Tomahawk (1951)
Tags: Traditional Western Western Action
Length: 82min
Tomahawk takes place during the Great Sioux Uprising of the 1860s. Van Heflin stars as famed frontier scout Jim Bridger, who labors valiantly and vainly to orchestrate peace between Indians and whites. Much of the action takes place at Fort Phil...
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Northwest Stampede (1948)
Tags: Romance Western Action
Length: 79min
In this romantic western, the real stars are a mustang and a police dog. The human aspect of the story centers on a rodeo rider whose late father bequeathed him a ranch in Calgary, Canada. The rider really tries to settle down to ranching, but finds...
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She Wrote the Book (1946)
Cast: Mischa Auer
Tags: Comedy
Length: 74min
In this comedy, a puritanical math teacher at a midwestern university is forced by the dean's wife to go to New York to collect the royalties for a naughty romance the latter wrote under a penname. Unfortunately, while there, the professor suffers a...
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Thieves' Highway (1949)
Cast: Lee J. Cobb Jules Dassin
Tags: Film Noir Crime Drama Drama
Length: 94min
Thieves' Highway is set in San Francisco and the surrounding countryside. Richard Conte plays Nick Garcos, an American GI who returns from WWII to find that his father Yanko (Morris Carnovsky), a produce trucker, has lost the use of both legs because...
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When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948)
Cast: Betty Grable
Tags: Showbiz Drama Musical
Length: 98min
Betty Grable and Dan Dailey play a couple of small-time vaudevillians, at least until Dailey gets a big Broadway break. Success swells his head to cataclysmic dimensions; he becomes an alcoholic, loses his stardom and winds up in the drunk ward....
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On Stage Everybody (1945)
Cast: Julie London Peggy Ryan
Tags: Comedy Musical
Length: 76min
Jack Oakie and Peggy Ryan head the cast of the Universal "B plus" musical On Stage Everybody. As indicated by the title, this is a "Let's put on a big show" affair, set this time at a radio station. Veteran vaudevillian Michael Sullivan (Jack Oakie)...
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Last of the Buccaneers (1950)
Cast: Jack Oakie
Tags: Action Adventure
Length: 79min
Generous amounts of stock footage from 1950's Fortunes of Captain Blood made its way into the Sam Katzman production Last of the Buccaneers. Paul Henreid plays famed buccaneer Jean Lafitte, who, after being chased out of Louisiana following the Battle...
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Jack Oakie

Biography: Jack Oakie

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