Can you guess what the following films have in common: Woman of the Year (1942), Race Street (1948), The Time of Your Life (1948), The Big Steal (1950), Gambling House (1951), Blackbeard the Pirate (1952), and Dangerous Mission (1954).  Go to the head of the class if you got this one right. I was half-watching these films on Turner Classics yesterday – soundlessly as always during trading hours – but it wasn’t until about midway through the third one, “The Time of Your Life,” that it dawned on me I’d been sucked into an all-day-long William Bendix retrospective.

No one can say the gang at Turner Classics doesn’t have a sense of humor, showcasing as they have -- for an entire day -- the dubious gifts of one of the most wooden actors ever to appear on the big screen. Bendix was an actor’s actor, but not for the same reasons we might say that about Robert Duvall or Gene Hackman. His enduring gift to the craft was to have made nearly all of the actors who worked around him look like Oscar material in comparison. In the film that’s on at this moment, Dangerous Mission,  even Victor Mature, an actor out of his element when not wearing a toga or a loincloth, seems very much at ease working opposite some real talent, including Vincent Price and Piper Laurie.

But every time Bendix is on-camera, the film, a C-grade suspenser originally released in 3-D, turns into unintentional comedy. Not only is Bendix incapable of delivering a line without making it sound stupid; with every step he takes in front of the camera, he reminds one of a baseball manager plodding stolidly to the mound. Hard to believe that Bendix, playing Babe Ruth in the 1948 biopic, was my very favorite star when I was eight years old. Could I have loved baseball that much? He has his fans, though, so maybe it’s time for me to take another look at him in “Lifeboat” (1942), generally regarded as the zenith of his twenty-year career.