Dean Jones spent a decade as Disney's ordinary man, standing beside a car with opinions or a cat and keeping a straight face while it got the laughs. A small gift, a rare one; the films that let him drop it gave him little back.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Dean Jones does when the Volkswagen starts making decisions of its own. He underplays, the way a man might look at a tap that will not stop dripping, mildly put out that the world has let him down again, and then he gets on with the scene. That was the job for most of his working life: stand beside the car with opinions, or the cat, or the duck, and keep the picture anchored to one recognisable adult while the animal or the machine took the laughs. It looks like nothing. It is quite hard, because the temptation in that position is to compete, and Jones almost never did.
He came to Disney sideways: small parts at MGM, a Broadway debut in 1960, then the lead in the NBC sitcom Ensign O'Toole (1962–63), which is what Walt Disney saw. From That Darn Cat (1965), as FBI agent Zeke Kelso, he was the studio's regular leading man into the 1970s, usually under Robert Stevenson or Norman Tokar, twice opposite Suzanne Pleshette, and most durably as Jim Douglas in The Love Bug (1968), a part he went back to for Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977). Critics at the time tended to call him bland, and if they meant the cat got more attention, they were right. If they meant he was doing nothing, they were wrong: a man reacting plausibly to an implausible thing is what makes the thing funny. In 1970 he was the original Bobby in Sondheim's Company on Broadway, and the cast album survives to show that the mild man could carry a Sondheim score.
When the leading parts stopped coming he turned round and played the other side: Other People's Money (1991), Beethoven (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994), villains and authority figures, with thick glasses and a changed voice to hide Herbie's driver. Our one meeting with the later Jones is Dr Varnick, the scheming vet in Beethoven, and it is the weakest thing in a film we found only serviceable. We caught ourselves waiting for him to leave the screen so the dog could come back, which is a hard thing to say about a man who spent a decade making sure the animal got its laugh. The fault is not his. John Hughes and Amy Holden Jones wrote the villains as cartoons, Charles Grodin got the exasperation and the lines, and a cartoon gives an actor who built a career on underplaying nowhere to stand. The disguise shows the effort; the writing wastes it.
"I had no illusions that I would ever play Hamlet," he said in 1997, and he was right. The straight man's lot is that nobody remembers him; they remember the car. If you have children in the house, start with The Love Bug, and watch the man rather than the Volkswagen. He is doing more than he appears to be.
Biography
Dean Jones (1931–2015) was an American actor. He appeared in numerous Walt Disney films from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, including That Darn Cat! (1965) and The Love Bug (1968), in which he played Jim Douglas. He later took on other film roles such as Dr. Varnick in Beethoven (1992) and Judge Moore in Clear and Present Danger (1994).
Jones began his career on stage, making his Broadway debut in 1960. He also appeared in television series including Bonanza and Murder, She Wrote, and provided voice work for animated projects such as Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero (1998). He was inducted into the Disney Legends Hall of Fame in 1995.
