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Always chipper and ingratiating, Robert Cummings enjoyed a 20-year-plus career in feature films before turning his attention to television. He reached a peak of popularity in his sitcom of the late 1950s, The Bob Cummings Show, broadcast on CBS and then NBC, and known in reruns as Love That Bob. Although essentially a light comedian, Cummings (1910-1990) served as dramatic leading man in several movies, most notably Kings Row (1942) and two Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, Saboteur (1942) and Dial M for Murder (1954).
A health enthusiast known for his perpetually youthful appearance, he was born Charles Clarence Cummings in Joplin, Mo., and educated at Carnegie Tech and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He began acting on Broadway in 1931, getting his first work by pretending to be an Englishman! His film debut came in an unbilled part in a short subject, Seasoned Greetings (1933), and he became a star with a role opposite Deanna Durbin in Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939).
Except for a handful of films in the sixties such as the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon romp Beach Party (1963), in which Cummings plays an anthropologist studying the mating habits of teenagers, the actor's peak period in Hollywood was during the years 1941-50. In the social comedy The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) he and Jean Arthur make a lively pair as co-workers at a department store owned by the world's richest man (Charles Coburn). Hitchcock's Saboteur, with its celebrated climax atop the Statue of Liberty, casts Cummings as a man falsely accused of sabotage and murder.
The fantasy Western Heaven Only Knows (1947) stars Cummings as an angel sent to earth to reform a corrupt gambler (Brian Donlevy). Rosalind Russell and Cummings are well matched in Tell It to the Judge (1949), a featherweight comedy about a divorced couple who make each other jealous with new partners (Gig Young and Marie McDonald). In The Petty Girl (1950) Cummings plays George Petty, a popular artist of the day who specialized in depicting gorgeous, scantily clad females. Joan Caulfield costars in this fictionalized account of Petty's involvement with a beautiful yet modest college professor.
During World War II Cummings served in the U.S. Army Air Corps as a flight instructor. The star of two other short-lived sitcoms in the 1960s, he was a frequent guest star on television through the 1970s. Married five times, he fathered seven children including the actor Tony Cummings.
by Roger Fristoe
 
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Silent Sunday Nights - November Schedule
Among the featured films this month are The Battle of the Sexes (1928) in which a golddigger and her boyfriend try to con an older businessman plus seven more treats from the silent era.
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