Word Balloon Comics Podcast

Welcome back to Scene Missing, the show where we dig past the highlight reels and get into the real story. This time, Gabriel Hardman, Ian Brill, and I take a hard, unsentimental look at the career of Burl Ives—a performer whose legacy is far bigger, messier, and more complicated than the warm baritone most people remember.We start with the role that earned him Hollywood’s highest honor: his Oscar-winning turn as Rufus Hannassey in The Big Country, opposite Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, and Charlton Heston—a performance that weaponized charm into something quietly menacing. From there, we contrast it with the brutal, snowbound moral reckoning of Day of the Outlaw, where Ives delivers one of the coldest outlaw portrayals ever put on film. We also explore his unexpected presence in prestige drama, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, sharing the screen with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, and how his earthy gravitas grounded Tennessee Williams’ overheated world.On television, we revisit his folksy patriarch on O.K.