Whenever he could, Hughes said, he would sit and chat with Bracken, this “direct link” to Sturges and old-time Hollywood. “He was a very dignified man and just so tremendously skilled in that old style.” “You’d see him arrive, and you’d think it was a poet laureate or something you didn’t think it was this comic actor,” Hughes recalled. Hughes first met Bracken on the set of “Vacation,” the 1983 comedy starring Chevy Chase, which marked a return to the big screen for Bracken. ‘What were you saying?’ He could turn that on a dime.” The reason we used him in ‘Vacation’ was that tongue-tied bit that he did, where he’s about to blow up and then he just stops. “There was a real sort of boy-next-door quality to him,” Hughes told The Times Friday. Writer-director-producer John Hughes, who worked with Bracken on three of his later films - “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” and “Baby’s Day Out” - describes Bracken’s ‘40s-vintage screen persona as “sweet and manic.” In the satirical “Hail the Conquering Hero,” he plays a small-town military reject who unwillingly poses as a Marine war hero who is caught up in a wave of hometown hero worship. Bracken is her faithful boyfriend, who winds up marrying Hutton and becoming father to the “miracle”: sextuplets. In the hilarious and racy-for-its-time “Miracle,” he’s cast opposite Hutton, who drinks at an all-night party, gets pregnant and can’t remember the name of the father. On Friday, Miller said, “His kind of comedy would be good today - he never went out of style.”īracken achieved his greatest screen successes in “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Hail the Conquering Hero.” The films, both released in 1944, established Bracken as both an actor and a comedian. “When I think of Eddie Bracken, I just want to smile,” Ann Miller, who co-starred with Bracken in the 1940 film “Too Many Girls” and decades later on stage in “Sugar Babies “ and “Follies,” told a reporter last May.
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