Fred MacMurray Movies

fred 11111Want to know the best Fred MacMurray movies?  How about the worst Fred MacMurray movies?  Curious about Fred MacMurray’s box office grosses or which Fred MacMurray movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Fred MacMurray movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

Fred MacMurray (1908-1991) was an American actor who appeared in more than 80 movies.  MacMurray also gained famed for playing Steve Douglas on the popular television show, My Three Sons, from 1960 to 1972.  His IMDb page shows 98 acting credits from 1929-1978. This page will rank 76 MacMurray movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Cameos, shorts and television appearances were not included in the rankings.

Drivel part of the page:  Seems I have been aware of Fred MacMurray most of my life.  Growing up it seemed that he was always on television.  During the week…  I would watch My Three Sons reruns three or four times a week.  Back then the highlight of the week (we only had 5 channels back then kids) was the Disney Movie Of The Week on Sunday nights.  Often one of MacMurray’s Disney movies would be the movie shown.   It took many years for me to realize that MacMurray actually had a massive movie career that had nothing to do with Disney or My Three Sons. Well this page (requested by Flora) is going to look at his entire movie career.

Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray in 1944's Double Indemnity
Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray in 1944’s Double Indemnity

Fred MacMurray Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort Fred MacMurray movies by co-stars of his movies
  • Sort Fred MacMurray movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Fred MacMurray movies by yearly domestic box office rank or trivia
  • Sort Fred MacMurray movies how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Fred MacMurray movie received.
  • Sort Fred MacMurray movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Fred MacMurray Table

  1. Twenty-five Fred MacMurray movie crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 32.89% of his movies listed. The Caine Mutiny (1954) is his biggest box office hit.
  2. An average Fred MacMurray movie grosses $105.60 million in adjusted box office gross.
  3. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  43 of Fred MacMurray’s movies are rated as good movies…or 56.57% of her movies.  Double Indemnity (1944) is his highest rated movie while The Swarm (1978) is his lowest rated movie.
  4. Twenty Fred MacMurray movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 26.31% of his movies.
  5. One Fred MacMurray movie won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 1.31% of her movies.
  6. An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00.  42 Fred MacMurray movie scored higher that average….or 55.26% of his movies. Double Indemnity (1944) got the the highest UMR Score while An Innocent Affair (1948) got the lowest UMR Score.
Fred MacMurray in 1961's The Absent Minded Professor
Fred MacMurray in 1961’s The Absent Minded Professor

Possibly Interesting Facts About Fred MacMurray

1. Frederick Martin MacMurray was born in Kankakee, Illinois.

2. Fred MacMurray was a very talented musician.  Before acting he was in numerous bands….his specialty was playing the saxophone.

3. Fred MacMurray was the first person to be named a Disney Legend…this occurred in 1987.

4. Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert starred in 7 movies together.  Their movie partnership was one of the most successful in the history of movies.  Their seven movies grossed over $948 million in adjusted box office gross.

5.  Fred MacMurray was married twice. He and Lillian Lamont were married from 1936 to 1953…they had two children.  From 1954 until his death in 1991 he was married to actress, June Haver…..they also had two children.  John Wayne is the person that introduced MacMurray and Haver.

6. Fred MacMurray most famous role is in 1944’s Double Indemnity.  He Initially turned down his most the role because he didn’t think his fans would want to see him playing a darker character.

7. Fred MacMurray starred in 4 movies that received a Best Picture Oscar® nomination: 1935’s Alice Adams, 1944’s Double Indemnity, 1954’s The Caine Mutiny and 1960’s The Apartment.  The Apartment won.

8. Fred MacMurray never received an Oscar® nomination…but did receive a Golden Globe Best Actor nomination for 1961’s The Absent Minded Professor.

9.  Fred MacMurray’s movies grossed over $7.59 billion in adjusted domestic box office.  His movies earned 48 Oscar® nominations….winning 5 times.

10.  Check out Fred MacMurray‘s career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. 

If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.

Final notes:  Two things to cover.  (1) There are a few MacMurray movies not ranked.  They were  from his very very early Paramount days.  (2) Some of the box office numbers on the MacMurray massive table are from an internet source that no longer exists.  Not sure how accurate the numbers are…but it was a choice between using these numbers or to exclude the movies from the table.  I discovered the website about 3 or 4 years ago…and wrote down all of the box office numbers they had.  Sadly that website has gone to internet heaven….and I never found out where they were getting their numbers.  A blown opportunity.

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40 thoughts on “Fred MacMurray Movies”

  1. STEVE
    1 Further to our exchanges on the William Powell site about Fred MacMurray’s westerns I thought it would be fun to compare IMDB’s ratings with those of Bruce [although as I am sure you would agree the latter are usually wrong !!]. Of course Bruce gives us added value with adjusted domestic grosses for each movie and he did well in that respect because all but Chuck’s Far Horizons are B movies and revenue stats for them are hard to come by. So here goes with Bruce’s rating and adjusted grosses both in square brackets after the IMDB ratings

    1953/The Moonlighter 59% [50.5%] [$42.6]
    1955/The Far Horizons 62% [45%] [$74.1] – co stars Heston
    1955/Gunpoint 63% [60%] [$46.3]
    1957/Gun for a Coward 60% [52%] [$43.0]
    1957/Quantez 63%[[47%] [$26.9]
    1958/Day of the Badman 61%[45.5%] [$12.0]
    1959/Good Day for a Hanging 64% [57%] [$20.9]
    1959/Face of a Fugitive 66% [61%] [$30.1]
    1959/Oregon Trail 49% [39.5%] [$15.5]

    IMDB RATINGS AVERAGE 60.8%
    BRUCE CRITIC/AUDIENCE AVERAGE 50.83%
    BRUCE ADJUSTED GROSSES AVERAGE $34.6 million

    2 You will note that Bruce marks the nine movies much lower than IMDB and in fact gives the Chuck/Fred Far Horizons his second lowest critic/audience rating among the 9. In fact Far Horizons is ranked 72nd out of 76 entries in Fred’s Cogerson overall critic/audience column. Bruce is right though to point to the fact that when Fred made these westerns he was on the way out in terms of stardom as in those days it was usually a sign that someone of MacMurray’s former status was in serious career trouble when he started appearing in B westerns – a situation that A C Lyles capitalised on all too well. .

    PS I DO hope that Bruce can find a figure for Bill Powell’s Treasure of the Lost Canyon as I’ve tried in vain and if I didn’t know better would have assumed it was another Myrna Loy co-starrer that William Powell wanted to pretend never existed !!

    Reply

    1. Hi Bob, in Bruce’s defence IMDB does most of the time give higher ratings than film critics and other internet movie reviewers (is there a difference?). The IMDB ratings are from ordinary film fans who generally like all kinds of movies, good and bad, famous and obscure, while my other ratings sources do get a little stingy with their scores.

      Thanks for posting those stats.

      So which was Fred MacMurray’s best western? The Far Horizons?

      Reply

      1. STEVE
        “You too Brutus?” – supporting the Supremo against our Chuck !

        Actually I think IMDB and the Maestro albeit with differing scores are both right in making Face of a Fugitive the best of the bunch and I support Bruce in giving the 2nd highest score to Gunpoint [aka At Gunpoint – which came first John?]. If I recall correctly the makers of Gunpoint must have taken to heart the Duke’s criticism of Cooper for appearing in High Noon which showed small town America up as cowards because in Gunpoint the townsfolk in the end all rally round Fred and help him clean up. Joel McCrea was originally to play Fred’s role in the film.

        Reply

      2. Hey Steve….good point about IMDb being higher……and about other sources being more “stingy” in their rankings. I have noticed that in Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Book…..that on many of their movies they give a rating this is slightly better than average….which scores a 62.5% in my database…which is “fresh” but real close to being “not fresh”.

        Reply

    2. Hey Bob….good breakdown on the MacMurray movies of the 1950s…..interesting to see that all of my ratings are lower than IMDb’s. I would have guessed that the other way….that my score would have been higher than IMDb’s. Makes me wonder if that happens everywhere….or if Fred’s numbers are unusual.

      Wow….I did not realize I had Far Horizons so lowly rated compared to MacMurray’s other movies….maybe I did not include the bonus Heston 15% points that I add for Steve….lol. That 34.6 million per movie is pretty low…..I imagine at that point in his career…..he had no idea that he was about to reach box office hit atmosphere again

      I will make sure to keep an eye out for Treasure of the Lost Canyon….when I update Powell’s page….I really think his movies listed will go from 36 to close to 60 when I do that update.

      Great comment as always.

      Reply

      1. HI BRUCE

        1 Pleased that you took an interest in my MacMurray exercise. I find that IMDB does seem to have a soft spot for those old Hollywood B westerns of the 50s.

        2 Chuck had still not found stardom when he made Far Horizons in 1954/55 and it wasn’t a great film but from memory I would not have thought it as bad as you make out and with or without Steve’s extra bonus points I would have thought 60% critic/audience would have been right. However I’m talking about a movie I last saw 60 years ago and in those day Wayne just had to outdraw somebody and I thought I was watching a classic!

        3 It would be nice if you could trace a stat for The Treasure of the Lost Canyon. Heaven knows I’ve tried hard enough. It was Bill Powell’s last stand alone film and after it he had only supporting parts in Liz Taylor’ The Girl who had Everything {I thought initially that that one was a Crawford screen biography} in Fonda’s Mr Roberts.and in Monroe/Grable’s How to Marry a Millionaire. By the way I think that Maltin is at odds with Amazon viewers and gives Treasure of Lost Canyon just 2 stars.

        4 Incidentally we were wondering if Nicole Kidman would ultimately be laid low by the “curse of 39” but it would seem that she doesn’t even fear the curse of FORTY NINE. The headlines in one of today’s newspapers over here is “I’m 49 and I want another baby.” – Nicole Kidman exclusive.

        Reply

        1. Hey Bob….I would imagine the people voting on those movies would be older than the voting public for the latest Star Wars movies….so I am sure when they are voting with fond memories of seeing those movies back in the 1950s when they were younger and watching a new western was the “big event” of the week. Which might help inflate the scores of the rating.

          I thought Far Horizons was ok….actually pretty sure I have that reviewed on Letterboxd.com. http://letterboxd.com/cogerson/film/the-far-horizons/ ….yep I gave it a pretty average review of 3 stars.

          I did a little research on The Treasure of the Lost Canyon……but I came up empty handed. But I will keep trying.

          I think the Curse of 39 does not include baby making….just the loss of box office juice…lol. Kudos to her if she wants another baby.

          Thanks for the comment and the visit.

          Reply

  2. Fred MacMurray got into three-strip Technicolor movies more or less from the beginning. His first color effort was The Trail of the Lonesome Pine in 1936, the first three-strip Technicolor movie filmed outdoors. He was also in Men with Wings in 1938.
    MacMurray made four color movies in the 1940’s, and twelve in the 1950’s, giving him 18 through 1959, one of the higher totals of a star in the classic era.
    He ended with 23 up through 1978.
    His best color movie in my judgment was The Caine Mutiny in 1954.
    In all, 23 color movies out of 86 total. And one was even in Trucolor (Fair Wind to Java)

    Reply

    1. Hey John
      1. Thanks for the information on MacMurray and the three-strip Technicolor movies.
      2. I actually knew The Trail of the Lonesome Pine was in color….as I read that the “color” made that a huge hit
      3. 18 color movies in the 1940s and 1950s…that is getting up there with Randolph Scott.
      4. I agree with you 100% about The Caine Mutiny….which is in my Top 3….with his two classic black and white movies…Double Indemnity and The Apartment.
      Thanks for sharing this information…it is greatly appreciated.

      Reply

  3. 1 Fred had a fine acting range that enabled him to play diverse roles such as in the comedy The Absent Minded Professor, Jack Lemon’s womanising boss in The Apartment, the cowardly sneak in The Caine Mutiny and the cynical and crooked insurance agent in Double Indemnity.

    2 Great posters for Smoky, Above Suspicion, No Time for Love, and Hands across the Table. In the No Time for Love had Fred fake muscles superimposed on him the way Ladd did in the posters for Two Years Before the Mast? As I did not become aware of Fred until the fifties and sixties I tended to think of him as largely a supporting actor [the Disney films apart] but your posters illustrate clearly that in his heyday he was usually in leading man roles and often the top billed star. Indeed he seemed the leading man most in demand by many top female stars appearing with for example Dunne, Crawford, Dietrich, Ava Gardner, and most prolifically Stanwyck and Colbert. and Lombard. He also appeared in several movies with Madeline Carroll.

    3 I like the stills of Fred with the other lead actors in The Caine Mutiny, that of him and Stanwyck from Double Indemnity and the closing solo one that showed how debonair he looked when he was very young.

    4 You and Bruce agree on 4 out of the Top 5 The overall video is for me a 9.2/10 for a fine profile of this star of bygone years.

    5 Incidentally your Caine Mutiny poster lists among the supporting actors Robert Francis who played Ensign Keith in the movie. Columbia who made The Caine Mutiny [1954] was grooming Francis for stardom and he had as much screen time in the film as any of the stars as the story was told through his eyes. However he made only 4 films as he died the following year aged only 25 when he crashed in his own private plane. I remember him well. Sad.

    Reply

    1. Thanks Bob, appreciate the review, rating, observation and info. I probably wouldn’t have done a video on Fred if Bruce hadn’t done a movie page on him and I saw how impressive his filmography was. I really only knew him from a handful of films, especially Double Indemnity and the Disney films.

      I was reading about Robert Francis on wikipedia when I last watched The Caine Mutiny earlier last year, only 25, sad indeed. And his death was eclipsed by James Dean’s fatal accident a few weeks after and he was only 24. What a waste of young talent.

      Fred M was an underrated actor “The two films I did with Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity (1944) and the The Apartment (1960), are the only two parts I did in my entire career that required any acting.”

      The complete version of the quote I used on the video – “I was lucky enough to make four pictures with Barbara. In the first I turned her in, in the second I killed her, in the third I left her for another woman and in the fourth I pushed her over a waterfall. The one thing all these pictures had in common was that I fell in love with Barbara Stanwyck — and I did, too.”

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjMUut0sics

      Reply

      2. Thanks for sharing the link to your latest You Tube video. I did not realize that about Robert Francis….it will change the way I watch his performance the next time I watch that classic movie. The Stanwyck/MacMurray screen team is among the best of all-time. Good stuff.

        Reply

    2. Hey Bob
      1. I agree 100% with you…..his range was incredible…..for kids like me that grew up with MacMurray as the kind and wise dad on My Three Sons and all his Disney movies…..it was hard to believe he could be some bad (his characters) in movies like The Apartment, Double Indemnity and The Caine Mutiny.
      2. I also agree there are some awesome posters in this page.
      3. 4 out 5 is actually pretty good…for the two different websites.
      4. Good information on Robert Francis…..I did not know that he died so young….I will be thinking about that the next time I watch The Caine Mutiny.
      Thanks for the comment.

      Reply

    1. Hey Søren…Fred MacMurray was not in The Shaggy Dog….that was Tim Allen playing the man turned into a dog……actually you are 100% correct….MacMurray’s 1959 The Shaggy Dog was missing from the page. This might be the biggest mistake we have ever made here…..as The Shaggy Dog was his biggest box office hit of his career…..and we did not even include it. How did we miss his biggest hit? That is a huge miss on my part! We will be bringing this up in the next department head meeting….lol. Thanks for the heads up….it is now on the page….and sitting in the 23rd spot….on the critic audience rating default setting for this page. Thanks again.

      Reply

  5. Hey, that was so interesting. It is odd that so many old time actors or actresses did not receive an Oscar but played many interesting roles. I remember him on TV when you were a kid too – he was born the same year Nanny was!!! I have seen quite a few of his movies but not too many of the older ones. There are so many interesting and wonderful old movies that never seem to make it on TV but they keep playing the same ones over and over. Perhaps some of the older movies have been misplaced or damaged over the years. THANKS AGAIN FOR AN INTERESTING SITE.

    Reply

    1. Hey BERN1960….thanks for sharing your MacMurray thoughts. That is interesting that MacMurray and your mom were born in the same year. As for movies disappearing….I know some of the real old ones are lost forever. I would think most of the movies from MacMurray’s career should be still around. I think alot depends on who owns the movies rights now….some are more aggressive while others do not do much with those rights. Glad you found and enjoyed my Fred M. page.

      Reply

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