Van Johnson, who died over the weekend at the age of 92, was, during his period of greatest popularity, a major movie star whose youthful screen image was freckle-faced propaganda for how MGM thought Americans should want to see themselves during the war years. A dancer-actor who had understudied Gene Kelly on Broadway, Johnson made his way to Hollywood in the '40s and had his first screen credit in the 1942 Murder in the Big House, made for Warner Brothers during the six months he was under contract to that studio. But his movie career didn't really begin in earnest until his move that same year to MGM, where Louis Mayer, with his romantic idealization of America as one big, homogeneous soda shop, must have taken one look at his clear-faced features and bright smile and swooned. MGM immediately established a pattern for his early career by sticking him in a uniform for a bit part in Somewhere I'll Find You. He would subsequently appear in such films as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Two Girls and a Sailor, The White Cliffs of Dover, The Human Comedy, Pilot #No. 5, and the star-making A Guy Named Joe, in which the ghost of a fallen bomber pilot (Spencer Tracy) played matchmaker between him and Irene Dunne. (Steven Spielberg later remade it as Always.) Most of these movies are borderline unwatchable now without the looming threat of the Axis menace in the back of your head to help give you a rooting interest in what was happening on the screen, but the Self-Styled Siren notes that "Johnson was third in box-office popularity in 1946, and in the top ten even in Britain. In a poll of theater owners he was ranked ahead of Bette Davis, Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart, among others." After enough hits radiating Crest-toothpaste enthusiasm, Johnson was sometimes allowed to return to his musical roots, as in the 1954 Brigadoon with Kelly, where he clearly enjoyed getting to show a little tartness and being able to play the more cynical member of the co-starring team. That same year, he slipped into uniform again for one of his more ambiguous tours of duty as the naval officer who has mixed feelings about alerting the world that his master and commander Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) is a few briquettes short of a barbecue.
As Johnson grew middle-aged, the movies seemed to have less and less use for him, and he spent more and more time on television, mixed in with the occasional return to the theater. But as parts dried up, Johnson himself developed a sturdy, patrician bearing that made him impressive to watch, even if the fact that you were watching him probably meant that you had nothing better to do that evening than turn on McMillan and Wife. He won an Emmy nomination for his work in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, but the brightest light on his late-career resume is Woody Allen's 1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which he played a character in that film's movie within the movie, doing a wonderfully precise send-up of the kind of distinguished penthouse daddy-o figure he could have played to perfection if only Hollywood hadn't stopped making those kinds of movies. Having toured in the musicals La Cage aux Folles and Show Boat when in his sixties and seventies, he retired after appearing in the 1992 Australian movie Clowning Around, a film also notable for having been Heath Ledger's screen debut.