The great comedy career Barbara Harris didn't have

It's a four-day weekend and my younger son wanted to watch Freaky Friday. In part because it was a Friday. I thought that was clever, for a seven-year-old. 

The movie was on his radar because it lost out in a choice of two Disney+ viewing options for family movie night last September. We ended up watching the 1995 comedy Heavyweights, about a camp for overweight children, which featured Ben Stiller as the evil owner of the camp. That was pretty good, and won out because my older son apparently thought it was 19 years less ancient looking than its 1976 competitor.

There was no controversy about it this time, fortunately. That could be because both kids are fresh off a recent viewing of The Court Jester, 21 years older than Freaky Friday, and at least the older one loved it. Maybe being "ancient" is not a death sentence for a movie after all.

I'd never seen Freaky Friday or its 2003 remake, which was the one the younger one first fired up on Disney+, probably because he only remembered the title. My wife, the one who originally suggested it, wasn't having any of that. She was looking for a little childhood nostalgia here.

Because that remake features Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, who were both prominent and I'm sure excellent choices for their roles, I figured I would similarly know both stars of the original, even though I was only two at the time it came out. I've consumed enough cinema since then that I thought I'd be well familiar with not only Jodie Foster, but with whoever played her mother.

Nope. I had never even heard of Barbara Harris.

In fact, when she first came on screen, I thought "That can't actually be Foster's mother. She's not a big star, and she doesn't seem very nimble." Maybe I was expecting someone like Barbara Eden, who would have been 45 at the time, and who had the kind of presence I was expecting in that role. (Or it could just be I'm thinking of Eden because my wife confused Harris for her, asking afterward if Harris had been in I Dream of Jeannie.) 

It's true, Harris does not reveal her comedic gifts right from the start of the movie. I mean, she starts out playing the mother, a "regular" 1970s homemaker who is on the prim and proper side. 

But once she starts playing her daughter, Annabelle, as part of the film's central conceit, watch out.

Simply put, this is one of the funniest physical comedy performances I have ever seen by an actress. She has a 13-year-old's loosey goosey mannerisms down perfectly. As I've got a child in my house who will soon be 11, I'm well aware of the erratic, convulsive way pre-teens move their bodies. So was Harris. 

She spends half the movie running around, but she scampers more than runs. And when she takes corners, it's clear she hasn't compensated for them by shifting her weight, so she's forever on the verge of falling over. She dances to popular music and blows bubbles, both at the same time. She climbs on top of a washing machine that she has overstuffed with rugs and shoes and enough laundry powder to drown a cat. She pinwheels her legs on her back. She smears makeup on her face. The best way to summarize her whole performance is that it's kind of like she's drunk, but not quite, because 13-year-old Annabelle doesn't know what it's like to be drunk. It's a kind of freedom of movement that would come from a 13-year-old pretending to be drunk. 

The big tour-de-force moment, though, is the one we see come to an end in the picture I've included above. In the climax of Freaky Friday, the two characters simultaneously wish to return to their original bodies, and the apparent simultaneity of the wish allows it to occur. Only, instead of returning the minds to the correct bodies, it returns the bodies to the correct minds, as it were. So a 13-year-old Annabelle is still driving a car carrying her younger brother and her neighbor, only now it's an actual 13-year-old body rather than a 38-year-old with a 13-year-old mind. That leaves Harris on a pair of water skis, both in mind and body now, and hopelessly out of her depth. The cross-cutting of these two scenes -- a zany car chase with police and the climax of a complicated water ski show -- left us absolutely in stitches, a place I never could have imagined from the film's more modest beginnings.

Although it is certainly a stuntwoman actually on the water skis, flailing around in a hilarious way, it was the close-ups of Harris that really had me rolling. Harris appears drunk again, but in a different way this time -- she's a woman so thrown by the events of the day that she's basically disconnected from her every instinct toward fear or panic. She's got this kind of sedated "come what may" quality to her as she improbably executes jumps and slaloms through the obstacles ahead of her.

The funniest moment for me was when she meets up with a hang glider that's going to comprise a short aerial climax, and already has a red-headed young boy affixed to it. As he looks on in horror as there is suddenly a woman his mother's age competing for the cross bar he's grasping, she asks in a very straight-faced way: "Could you help me, young man?" Like she needed him to carry a bag of groceries, not save them both from a potential aquatic disaster.

We scurried to IMDB after the movie, my wife wondering how she knew Barbara Harris, me wondering if I knew her at all. And her credits were dispiritingly scant, at least in terms of anything we both would have known, or both would have remembered her from. Yeah, I'd seen her in movies like Nashville, Peggy Sue Got Married, Grosse Pointe Blank and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but I certainly don't remember her from them. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is the only one of those I've seen more than once, and I don't remember her role.

What a shame.

From what I saw in Freaky Friday, I feel like Harris could have, should have had a career like Lucille Ball, becoming famous for her ability to execute physical comedy and for her great timing. Ball was primarily a television star, of course, and I momentarily hoped Harris might have been a mainstay on some sitcom. Nope. She only had guest spots on TV.

This is not to say Harris did not have an acclaimed career. She was actually nominated for an Oscar, three Golden Globes and three Tonys, one of which she won. And comedy does appear to be the mode in which she was most recognized for these honors, having started out in the Second City comedy troupe.

But Freaky Friday, instead of being a launching pad to greater successes, was actually her last such nomination. She was only appearing in movies for ten more years, with an isolated return performance ten years after that in Grosse Pointe Blank. 

Sadly, that is not a huge surprise for an actress who was 41 when Freaky Friday came out, especially 45 years ago, when actresses had an even harder time extending their careers than they do today. But I feel like even if Freaky Friday didn't propel her to a ton more work, it should have been the culmination of a great body of film work that we'd still know today. Who's responsible for not properly harnessing what Harris had to offer?

The Wikipedia entry on Harris is very generous, giving both an indication of some of the other roles in the vein of Freaky Friday, and her thoughts on her own career in general. So I know the Freaky Friday performance didn't come out of nowhere. In fact, Harris was considered such an ascendent talent that not one, but at least two Broadway musicals were written for her. She had comedy roles in a couple movies with really long names that I now need to seek out: Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad, and Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? The latter earned her her Oscar nod.

Whatever comic gems I find in her earlier filmography -- not to mention the movies I've seen, which I'm now eager to revisit -- it's not going to change the fact that Barbara Harris did not become the household name she deserved to become. But maybe that was by her own choice.

See, that generous Wikipedia entry also reveals the following quotations from Harris:

"Who wants to be up on the stage all the time? It isn't easy. You have to be awfully invested in the fame aspect, and I never really was."

And:

"I haven't worked in a long time as an actor. I don't miss it. I think the only thing that drew me to acting in the first place was the group of people I was working with."

In fact, Barbara Harris became a teacher late in her career. A weird time to start teaching, in your fifties or maybe even sixties, but Harris was full of surprises. She surprised the hell out of me after I didn't anticipate much from her first moments on screen in Freaky Friday.

Barbara Harris died three years ago of lung cancer. It seems she had the career she wanted to have, nothing less, nothing more. And that feels good. 

And lucky me, I have plenty of her Barbara Harris performances I can still seek out. (She was also in Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot, which I will certainly one day see.) 

It's only out of greed, and a mistaken notion of how we define a "successful" career, that I wish there were three times more.