When I first heard that Ernest Borgnine passed away today at the age of 95, my first thoughts were of his great film roles in The Wild Bunch (1969), From Here to Eternity (1953), and Marty (1955), for which he won a Best Actor Academy Award. But as the news sunk in, I began to think more and more about the way I first saw him when I was a kid. Before I watched any of those movies, I knew him as Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale on McHale’s Navy. The series ran from 1962-1966, overlapping with The Andy Griffith Show. Borgnine and Griffith, who also passed away in the last week, had the great talent to play the heart of their respective shows amidst a sea of wacky characters. Neither show would be so fondly remembered without the fine work by the two actors.
Borgnine also appeared in two spin-off movies with the characters from the show, and he also had a small role in the 1997 film McHale’s Navy with Tom Arnold. Below is the first part of the first episode of the first season of McHale’s Navy, originally broadcast in 1962.
In this clip, Borgnine remembers how he became involved in McHale’s Navy, which started out from a drama called Seven Against the Sea.
Both Sheriff Taylor and Lt. Commander McHale were both men in uniform, but each know sometimes you had to work against an unfair system. Sheriff Taylor would dispense his own kind of fairness and justice, while McHale regularly found ways to protect his men from the often inept authority figure Captain Wallace Burton Binghamton (played by Joe Flynn). While neither comedy was revolutionary, looking back, one sees a little of the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s seeping out of these characters from early in the decade. Although McHale’s Navy was set during World War II, Ernest Borgnine knew how to give a heart to a character surrounded by craziness during a decade that saw the country getting deeper into another war in Asia. Rest in peace.
(Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)
