Art Fleming alert

[Fedya]

The Art Fleming we all know and love appeared in a few movies not doing a cameo; one of these, MacArthur, is airing at 1:35 AM ET Wednesday on HBO Family*.  It's been years since I've seen this, so I only remember it for Gregory Peck's pipe-smoking performance as General Douglas MacArthur, but Fleming appears as "The Secretary".  It can't be any worse a way to spend 130 minutes than Playmania.

*HBO Family apparently has both an East Coast and West Coast feed, so those of you on the west coast might only see the movie three hours later.

[Don Howard]

I don't think he gets any close-ups in the movie. There are some medium shots, though.
That voice of his, though, is unmistakable. And he's in a good portion of the film.
He did get one close-up in The Moneychangers, but it was brief and he had a moustache.
Thanks for the alert. Tape will roll. Check that. Disc will spin.

[Tim L]

Art Fleming was so identified with Jeopardy! people forget he was an actor.  I've read of at least one Syndicated series he was in called International Detective about 1959-60..I guess he played the lead role in this series.  Ive never seen it anywhere though..

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'Don Howard\' post=\'159149\' date=\'Jul 30 2007, 09:43 PM\']
Thanks for the alert. Tape will roll. Check that. Disc will spin.[/quote]
And you'll find, sad to say, that 130 minutes of PlayMania just might be preferable after all.  
Peck's fine, but this is one ponderous movie.

[TLEberle]

[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'159162\' date=\'Jul 30 2007, 07:47 PM\']And you'll find, sad to say, that 130 minutes of PlayMania just might be preferable after all.  [/quote]I think you've just set the new watermark for films. "Would I rather watch this or sit through an episode of PlayMania."

Oof.

[tomobrien]

If you ever saw the commercial Art starred in for Vel detergent ("It's mar-VEL-ous!") in the early 50s, you'd know why he got into hosting.  He plays the easily confused husband whose wife pours Detergent X into his hand.  He then utters the immortal line, "Hey!  That's hot!", presumably referring to the chemical composition of Detergent X and not his wife.  Gregory Peck had nothing to fear.

[uncamark]

[quote name=\'Tim L\' post=\'159153\' date=\'Jul 30 2007, 08:54 PM\']
Art Fleming was so identified with Jeopardy! people forget he was an actor.  I've read of at least one Syndicated series he was in called International Detective about 1959-60..I guess he played the lead role in this series.  Ive never seen it anywhere though..
[/quote]

As "Arthur Fleming."

In the early 70s, WSNS in Chicago ran the series--I was watching it from college in DeKalb, which meant snowy reception of a murky print one of the few times I tried to see the series.

The producer/syndicator (I believe the show was actually produced in the UK) was Official Films, once a big deal in the early years of television, but now lost in the mist somewhere.  Googling shows that the series was produced for ABC Weekend in the UK--I believe that Studio Canal Plus owns ABC's back library, but whether they want to put the series on DVD is another matter.

The description is that Fleming played a detective for the real-life Burns Detective Agency and the series was supposedly based on actual cases solved by the agency.  One of the other regulars on the series was Millicent Martin, who would become a star in the UK a few years later as the original TW3 Girl on the original "That Was the Week That Was," had a steady career in musical theater and television in the UK, moved to the U.S. when she got portly and became a character actress--when she was on a CBS series whose title escapes me, she did a week of "$25K Pyramid" in the 80s.