Repeats of 1960s American sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and Get Smart were a staple of Sydney television in the eighties and nineties. Colour episodes of My Three Sons ran for occasional stretches on Channel 7 on weekday afternoons at least up until the late nineties. I remember because the show was a welcome distraction during my HSC study. A bit of kitsch goes a long way when you’re procrastinating. Some years later I found an episode at the end of an old VHS cassette. I reviewed this episode (just one of 380 filmed between 1960 and 1972) for the Internet Movie Database under the alias ‘Alvy Singer’. I’ve been amused to see my review referenced online over the years, including at www.tv.com. Well, I claim authorship. Here is a totally revised text.
My Three Sons, series 7, episode #7.7 or no. 223: ‘Robbie’s Underground Movie’ (first broadcast on CBS 27th October 1966).
“A typical family, prisoners of conformity, mechanically going through drab routines, ignoring what’s true, human and important.”
As a depiction of idealised middle-class US suburbia in the 1960s, My Three Sons is a charming artefact. I’m going to look in detail at one specific episode written by John McGreevey and directed by James V. Kern. ‘Robbie’s Underground Movie’ is a satire of non-conformism and avant garde art, and by the same means a defense of Hollywood mass entertainment and family values.
Steve Douglas (Fred MacMurray) returns home from work one evening to consume the proverbial milk and cookies (MacMurray had enough star clout to insist that his season’s worth of scenes be filmed out of sequence in one easy hit, which surely meant a massive daily dose of milk and cookies). Not-too-bright eldest son Robbie (Don Grady) announces that he is taking a film course at college as a way to make time with a girl named Gina Rose (Linda Foster). Robbie has been converted to her anti-establishment philosophy of “validity” and “honesty”, in opposition to the middle-class suburban life as lived by the Douglas family, a “daily denial of reality, of beauty…the incubation of conformity and hypocrisy.”
Yes, Robbie has been brainwashed by crazy ‘artist’ types. With breathtaking naïvety he dares to plan a film criticising the suburban utopia of Bryant Park, Illinois. He will contrast “drab, meaningless family routine” with “freedom, honesty, the unconventional,” as personified by the nubile Gina Rose. It’s not amazing that Robbie is so easily led away from the path of common sense, even if he’s had a lifetime of brainwashing in televisionland. Really he’s just an all-American guy thinking with his dick. That’s okay as long as he learns a lesson in the end (i.e. don’t think with your dick). We are never in doubt that the social order will be restored to perfect harmony because we are assailed by repeated cuts to Steve’s gentle, affable, amused, self-satisfied, tolerant, seen-it-all-before grin. I imagine MacMurray simply filmed a stockpile of these reaction shots for the editor to splice in at random.
In class, after viewing a student film focusing on nothing but a dripping faucet (title: What We Anticipate Seldom Occurs), Robbie dares the opinion that “nothing happened of a probing nature.” The other students, especially Gina Rose, roll their eyes and talk about unrealised potential: “It speaks with muted eloquence of our common frustrations!”. Well, Robbie is a dolt. But he might be on the money because these pseudo-experimental films by pseudo-pseudo-intellectuals are scored with Frank Devol’s zippy Disneyesque music as opposed to, say, Cecil Taylor. The next film is four minutes of blank celluloid by an overzealous student who asks the audience to “project its own images”. I’d like to think this is a reference to John Cage’s 4′33″ because that would show some awareness on the part of the writer of what he is trying to parody.
So, the students like “the more artistic efforts, far above the taste of the masses,” sneers Steve. It’s true. Gina Rose moans that “every artist has to contend with the masses”. Well, damn it, Steve is gonna defend the worth of “that commercial junk” made by Hollywood for the common taste. Junk like My Three Sons, I’m guessing. You can almost hear the indignant pounding of the typewriter keys.
There’s a subplot. The chairman of the board kindly rewards Steve for the overtime he has been putting in at the office: a present of two kite-tailed guppies. Corporate America is a real nice place, you know. Robbie gets the idea to put the fish in his movie (“symptomatic of the meaningless swim round and round”). Eternally haughty Uncle Charlie (William Demarest) also volunteers his services as an actor, doing his best Eye-talian.
Sanity is restored when Robbie’s student film is completed and it dawns on him that “the family pictures turned out real and honest” while Gina Rose’s sequences are “phoney”. It’s phoney alright. The makers of the show don’t seem to have had a clue about what was actually happening in mid-1960s America. Gina Rose is no pretentious pale-skinned beatnik avant garde film student chick of 1966. She wears the same bland clothes as her peers except when she appears, for no real reason, in a French Can-Can outfit (it’s as if they raided the CBS costume department and grabbed the first thing that came to hand). Instead of a dimly-lit coffee house with a folk singer or poet in the background, she hangs out at an all-American diner drinking milkshakes with Robbie – or ‘Robert’, as she insists on calling him, a strange formality for someone so desperate to reject conformity. This fantasy of a ‘non-conformist’ says a lot about Hollywood in 1966: There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear. Fred MacMurray’s reaction shot is the epitome of tolerant establishment smugness, but it has the hint of a snarl of total contempt – not an uncommon reaction to youth culture as the sixties blew up with anti-Vietnam protests and inner-city race riots.
Get Smart, with its occasional frugging party scenes and dopey beatniks, was much more aware of what it was satirising and therefore much funnier (the episode titles are a good indication: ‘I Am Curiously Yellow’, ‘Closely Watched Planes’, `The Mild Ones’). The corny depiction of ‘Beatniks’ in mainstream American culture, particularly 1960s TV, has been examined by Outré Gallery Press in a book called Beatsville.
My Three Sons is good fun for those who like television with an irony deficiency.
[A CBS promo c. 1966-67]
[Original review: 15 November 2001; revised: 19 November 2007]
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