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--"Hearts of the West" is an amusing, if largely forgotten, comedy released in 1975 and starring a baby-faced Jeff Bridges as a 1930s writer of Wild West novels who heads to Hollywood, where he's cast in B-movie westerns. In a supporting cast that also includes Blythe Danner and Alan Arkin, Griffith plays Billy Pueblo, a crusty western actor in a performance with as much grit as charm. After Bridges' character has injured his privates by landing on a horse for a scene without wearing a cup, Billy exclaims with harsh compassion, "Didn't anybody tell him?" Then he righteously lectures him on how to deal with the powers-that-be: "Whenever they want something special, like that kind of a jump, you've got to wait `em out. You wait till the price gets high enough to make it worth your while."
--"Matlock," which ran nine years starting in 1986, was a pleasant, prolonged postscript to "The Andy Griffith Show" in the form of a light-hearted formulaic drama. A Southern lawyer instead of a Southern lawman, Matlock, with his slower gait and head of silver hair, could have been Andy Taylor at a later stage of life. Set in Atlanta, there was no sense of community on the show, as there was with mythical Mayberry, but Matlock, as a steadfast individual, embodied the same upright values and sense of order that helped make Sheriff Taylor so endearing. Matlock was a reassuring figure for viewers to visit, and Griffith made him that way.
--Griffith's Ritz cracker commercials. Nearly every actor who can do commercials does them, even though, too often, these mini-performances trivialize substantial work they may have done in other spheres. Not so with Griffith and Ritz, for which he served as a spokesman in the 1970s. So memorable were those ads that, 20 years later, he would speak of fans still approaching him and echoing the tagline: "Gooood crackuh." No wonder. The ads captured what people knew, or thought they know, about Griffith, and loved: the Andy Taylor in him. Griffith did grand work, maybe did it too well to have been granted the full complement of roles that he deserved, and that his Andy Taylor image may have denied him. But when he told the world, "Everything tastes great when it sits on a Ritz," there could be no dispute. In those few words he was exhibiting good-heartedness, a love of life and appreciation for life's small delights. And viewers got it. "Mmmm-mmmmm! Gooood crackuh!" Good guy.
[Associated
Press;
Frazier Moore is a
national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be
reached at fmoore@ap.org and at
http://twitter.com/tvfrazier.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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