Don Knotts’ Most Memorable Roles Remembered By His Daughter, Karen

The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964)

In this live action/animated film, Don plays Henry Limpet, a man who, during World War II, finds himself transformed into a fish but with his mind intact. He reaches out to the US Navy to help locate and destroy Nazi submarines during World War II. “If not the first it was certainly one of the first films to combine live action with animation,” says Karen. “Maybe Disney did one before [they did, 1946’s Song of the South], but this was very early on. In those days, films always debuted in New York, and it got a terrible, crushing review in New York that it never recovered from. That review destroyed the movie and it got no box office after that. The man who produced it, John C. Rose, went to Mexico after that, retired and never made another movie again. Dad wasn’t frustrated about the movie, because it was still a great piece of work. I don’t think he was expecting anything major out of it.”

The Fish That Made Karen Knotts Cry

During the making of The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Karen was able to go to the set, which was a lot of fun. “I remember seeing Carole Cook putting the glasses on the face of the imaginary fish,” she recalls. “Actually what they had in front of her was just a box full of junk that was raised up on a crane so that it would be at the proper eye level for her. Then she could lean forward and put the glasses on him. In the end, it was a very touching scene; she was such a very good actress. So she leaned forward and put the glasses on the fish, and the way she did that made me realize that I wanted to be an actress because I saw the power of that moment, how she made it real while just talking to a box of stuff.

“The funny thing is,” Karen adds, “is that we had a 16-millimeter projector in our house. Every time my brother would thread the movie and we’d watch it, when it came to that part where my dad turned into fish, I would start to cry. I don’t know why. My dad was obviously still alive — he was actually in the same room with me — and he wasn’t a fish, but it just made me sad.”

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

The first of Don’s five-picture deal with Universal, this saw him cast as Luther Heggs, an aspiring newspaper reporter who, in an effort to break in and impress Joan Staley’s Alma Parker, agrees to spend the night in a supposedly haunted mansion that was the site of a murder-suicide. Says Karen, “He was absolutely terrified, excited, overwhelmed… everything about this movie because it was the one he left the Griffith Show to do. I mean, he left for the five-picture deal, but on this one I just remember him being extremely nervous, pacing around the house, and just completely consumed with it.

“He had his own little bungalow at Universal Studios with an office and a secretary,” she continues. “He would go down there to work with the writers. He actually hired Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, who were two of the top writers on The Andy Griffith Show. Part of his nervousness is that he didn’t have the safety net of The Andy Griffith Show. There, the producers were running the show and Andy was kind of like [the] kindly headmaster, but none of that was there now. It was him.”

Andy Griffith & Mr. Chicken

What was surprising to Karen is the fact that The Ghost and Mr. Chicken was filmed over the course of only 17 days for a very low budget. “It was so unbelievable,” she says, “and now it’s a classic film. And it was exciting for him, because he was stepping out and being his own boss now, and that was scary, but the film’s success was a huge deal. What’s interesting is that the first draft of the script wasn’t working very well, so Dad called Andy Griffith in to be a story consultant. That’s a little-known fact, that Andy Griffith was one of the best story consultants in the business. He had a mind for stories that was absolutely unbelievable, and that’s probably one of the reasons why those stories on the Griffith Show were so tight. Every story had a beginning, middle and end, and an arc, and surprises. I think a lot of that was Andy’s doing.”

The Reluctant Astronaut (1967)

Carnival ride operator Roy Fleming gets a job as a janitor at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, and through a variety of reasons finds himself sent into space in an effort to beat the Russians there. As was the case with The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, the script was by Andy Griffith Show veterans Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum. Thanks to the success of the previous film, he was far more confident this time out. “He kind of knew the ropes now,” relates Karen. “One interesting thing about The Reluctant Astronaut is that he actually went to NASA to poke around the rockets there. There’s a picture of him somewhere up there in the rocket, looking around. It’s possible it wasn’t research and that he was invited there.”

String Theory

One element of filming The Reluctant Astronaut that amused Karen had to do with the means in which anti-gravity would be achieved on a rocket ship. She explains, “In those days when you had to have things lift off the ground in a rocket, like a peanut butter tube or something, it would float because of strings that were attached to it and lifted it up. Nowadays, with CGI, they don’t need to do it that way anymore. But when I was a kid, I loved the fact that you could see the strings on set, but they were gone when the movie came out.”

The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968)

Having been a reporter and a semi-astronaut in his previous two films, Don next turned his attention to the Old West as 1870 dentist school graduate Jesse W. Haywood. Jesse finds himself manipulated by a woman (Barbara Rhoades) who is looking for a pardon for her crimes by tracking down a ring of gun smugglers, and (naturally) he finds himself right in the middle of the danger. “Those films really did cover a lot of ground,” says Karen, “dealing with a lot of different themes and topics, so you never got bored. I mean, his performance in The Shakiest Gun in the West was hysterical. They came up with some great gags.

“This was a remake of a Bob Hope film called The Paleface,” she elaborates. “Barbara Rhoades was a contract player at Universal, and she didn’t have a very good acting background. My father said she wasn’t really ‘cutting the mustard’ in that role, so he worked with her a lot. He taught her how to act, basically, and in the end she did a fine job. But she didn’t have enough training at the time, but she was beautiful and was cast. Dad didn’t have any choice in who was cast in the role.”

“Stop Smiling, Karen!”

Karen was on set during the filming of The Shakiest Gun in the West, and she remembers one moment in a saloon when beers were being slid down the bar. “I think I actually put my hand down on the bar and kind of wrecked the shot,” she shrugs. “Also my brother and I were extras in that moment; we were extras in a lot of them. I was so excited to be on the set for this one that I couldn’t stop smiling. I was just happy and kept smiling. So I’m standing there in the background, during this shootout Dad has with the gunslinger, and I’m smiling. The crowd is supposed to be terrified. I think I was 11 or 12. So in between takes, the costume lady comes over to me and wanted to change my outfit a little bit. So they gave me this Western hat, it was big and flat with a wide brim, and the hat covered my face. It put my face in shadow, so you couldn’t see me smiling. Oops.

“My brother and I were hamming it up like crazy on the set of that movie. We were all over the place, running around, playing around on the sets like we were cowboys and Indians, and it was beautiful.”

The Love God? (1969)

In reflecting on this film, Karen Knotts offers up a description of what it was about. “This was his fourth picture in the deal,” she details, “so by this point, they had three in the can and they were all successes, generating a nice bit of profit there. Because of that, the studio wasn’t paying too much attention anymore to the scripts and that sort of thing. So this script, written by Nat Hiken, comes in and in it Dad plays this guy, Abner Peacock IV, who has a bird magazine that’s failing, and he can’t get enough funding for it. These gangsters, who run a porno ring with a dirty magazine, decide to buy out his magazine so they can put their own content in it. And they convince him it to become the symbol of the magazine, and they basically turn him into Hugh Hefner.”

With all due respect, it is difficult to imagine Don the role of a Hugh Hefner type. “And that was the problem,” Karen laughs. “Everybody thought of him as a squeaky-clean guy, which he had always been. I mean, this was all comical and a satire, of course, but all of a sudden the studio didn’t know where the audience was going to be. They had him in these outrageous costumes — like the ultimate 1960s outrageous Nehru jackets and hats… I can’t even describe these outfits that they had him in. Plus they had a bevy of women following him around from city to city, while he’s totally naive about what’s going on. Plus, Anne Francis plays a woman trying to facilitate all this, who tries to seduce Abner. At the same time, he’s got a girl at home [Margaret Ann Peterson].”

The Love God? could have used a little more love.

On a personal level, Karen enjoyed her time on the set, and the excess of the lifestyle that was being set up for Abner, but she notes that the film had a number of things working against it, the first thing being that his usual writers weren’t available, resulting in the hiring of Nat Hiken, a top comedy writer at the time. “Instead of letting Dad look over the different drafts of the script, Nat kept saying, ‘No, no, you can’t look at this until it’s finished.’ So that drove my dad crazy, because he was one of those nervous people who would say, ‘I want to know what I’m getting myself into!’ It took Nat forever to write it, and when it was finally finished, they shot it. Afterwards the studio finally realized what the movie was about and they were stunned. They didn’t really want to promote it, so they didn’t. It got very little publicity and came and went as a result, with very few people even knowing it existed.

“I honestly don’t know how Dad felt about it,” Karen muses, “but he was always kind of frustrated with his squeaky-clean image. He loved being Barney Fife and all that, but then, as we got into the late ’60s, everything had this sexual innuendo to it. It was the days of free love and all this stuff, so he was hindered by that because of his image. Many of the sketches they wrote for him on variety shows had to be toned down, because they didn’t want to offend his public, which he thought was a little bit unnecessary.”

How to Frame a Figg (1971)

Returning to his comic roots (and stepping back from the more adult The Love God?), Don plays incompetent city bookkeeper Hollis Figg who, in an attempt to cover up a crime, is promoted by his corrupt boss. Allowing the promotion to go to his head, he takes things very seriously (something that frequently happened with Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show) and could inadvertently expose the truth.

“I don’t remember very much about this one,” admits Karen, “but I remember Dad saying that that was the end of his film career such as it was, because the family picture era had ended at that point. The variety shows were coming to an end, too. Hippies were prominent and it changed the whole texture of the way they were marketing things. So that was kind of the end of an era for him. But he did the five pictures, they were successful and he was very happy, because it established him as a movie star and somebody who could carry a movie.”

Teaming Up With Tim Conway

Things were quiet on the film front for Don for the next four years, but he staged something of a comeback when he was teamed up with funnyman Tim Conway (The Carol Burnett Show) in the 1975 Western comedy The Apple Dumpling Gang. So comically potent was the combination, that they would team up again for Gus (1976), the focus of which is on a football-playing mule; The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979), the 1930s-set boxing comedy The Prize Fighter (1979), and, finally, The Private Eyes (1980), which sees them as bumbling American detectives who are working with Scotland Yard.

“Disney put Dad and Tim together, and whoever came up with that combination was brilliant,” Karen says. “He was ecstatic making those films, especially the Apple Dumpling films. He absolutely adored Tim Conway, and they were great friends. Tim did ad-lib a lot and he wrote a lot, too, so my dad had to kind of learn to adapt to Tim and learn to improvise a bit. He was comfortable doing it as long as he was with Tim.”

Three’s Company (1979-84)

Although Don made other movies here and there, none of them really made as large of an impression as those he made with Tim Conway. Far more important for him was joining the hit ABC series Three’s Company as landlord Ralph Furley, where he would work his comic magic with John Ritter, Joyce DeWitt, and Suzanne Somers. “What was wonderful about the show is that it introduced him to a whole new generation who was discovering him,” enthuses Karen. “That was such a wonderful thing because he just kept coming back. It’s like The Andy Griffith Show touched one generation, The Apple Dumpling Gang touched another, and Three’s Company reached a whole different audience. So in every phase of his career, he became known to a new age group of people. It was fantastic.”

And so was the film and TV career of Don Knotts as a whole, though you would be hard-pressed to figure out which medium he enjoyed more. As Karen explains, “He just looked at things as one project or another. He never was one to go back and look at stuff from the past. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing him watch The Andy Griffith Show. He loved the show, but he would just look at each new project for what it was and take it for what it was. And dive into that particular project. That’s just how he functioned.”