Thank you for the compliment!
---
I never specifically heard of The Hostiles but something jogs a dim memory of hearing that Eastwood and Wayne were to have starred together back then. It's interesting because I've always considered Eastwood, broadly speaking of course, as the closest actor we had to Wayne from the late 70s through the 90s. Obviously there's the western connection but the sort of iconic figure Eastwood became is somewhat reminiscent of Wayne, though no one was ever bigger or more iconic than the Duke. It's too bad they never worked together. If it was Wayne's decision it's a shame he let his ego get in the way -- or perhaps he was worried about the comparison as his career was dimming a bit while Clint's was growing.
---
I once saw John Wayne being interviewed on television in the early seventies and being asked if he saw anyone taking his place. He hesitated for a bit and then said "well, I think this young fellow Clint Eastwood is certainly making his mark." So he WAS aware and appreciative of Eastwood.
But evidently not enough to want to work with him. Eastwood himself had said he'd tried to work with Wayne, but I didn't realize until I read the Eyeman book how HARD Eastwood did this, how he actually optioned a property -- paid money for it -- and repeatedly sent the script to Wayne. (Wayne is quoted as holding the script and saying "oh, no, THIS piece of blank again" before throwing it off the Wild Goose.
Wayne likely had too much ego to share the screen with a man he saw as his replacement -- for Wayne had certainly shared the screen with "Era peer" co-stars in recent years: Robert Mitchum and Dean Martin and Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas, to name a few.
There are some ironies here. For HIS part, Eastwood had an ego, too, and after having to work with other, older stars for awhile(Richard Burton, Lee Marvin, Shirley MacLaine), he became a "lone wolf star" from The Beguiled to City Heat(where he finally teamed with Burt Reynolds, to no effect.) But Eastwood would have made an exception for John Wayne. It hurts to think we didn't get that movie just because Wayne said "no."
Also, Eastwood himself noted later that while he admired John Wayne on the screen, he actually saw his OWN Western role model as...James Stewart! Eastwood identified with the neurotic loners Stewart played in his Anthony Mann Westerns. When you think of it, John Wayne was probably more of a "warm, uncle-ish type" of big guy than the nasty-edged Eastwood on the screen.
----
Everyone talks about how appropriate it was that Wayne's final film was The Shootist because of its subject matter, and it was, but what people forget is that at the time no one expected it to be Wayne's swan song. He was still in good health in 1976 and there were other projects on the table. But for various reasons none was ever realized. I think he had one or two more left in him, but it is just too sadly appropriate for him to have ended on The Shootist.
---
I akin John Wayne with The Shootist in 1976 to Alfred Hitchcock(as a director) with Family Plot in 1976. Both movies FELT like they should be "final films," but both Wayne and Hitchcock lived on and gave interviews about new projects they were working on. Hitchcock developed a spy movie called "The Short Night" and Wayne was trying to prepare a "family Western" called "Beau John," with Ron Howard agreeing to play his son.
But actually health DID eventually get both Wayne and Hitchcock. Each man's final film is in 1976, and they died less than a year apart -- Wayne in 1979 and Hitchcock in 1980. When the 80's came, Hitch and the Duke were gone.
---
I had heard that Lonesome Dove was originally intended as a theatrical film but don't remember having read any details...though here again for some reason something tells me I did once hear of its once having been intended as a vehicle for Wayne. I may have read something about that when the series finally aired.
---
That's another one where John Wayne himself seems to have been the key to the movie NOT happening. Stewart, Fonda, Cybill Shepard and Ryan O'Neal had all said "yes" to Bogdanovich, but without Wayne, Warners would not finance the movie, even with a "hot" director like Peter Bogdanovich at the helm. (Interesting, by the early seventies, Stewart and Fonda were aged stars with failed TV shows and NOT bankable; only Wayne of their set still was.)
Wayne told the press he felt that "Streets of Laredo" was too much "one of those End of the West things," and he didn't like that tone. Ironic: The Shootist was certainly and End of the West thing, with Wayne and "guest star" Stewart two old men talking about Wayne getting ready to LITERALLY die.
It is also said that John Ford convinced Wayne not to do the movie, maybe because he didn't like Peter Bogdanovich that much, EVEN THOUGH Bogdanovich had directed(in 1971) a documentary on Ford.
And there-in lies a tale with me in it, if I may(hey, I may not be around to tell it too many times in future years.)
In November of 1971, I lived near Los Angeles, I was a teenager, and my family had "friends of friends" who got us into a special Academy screening of the John Ford documentary. In attendance were Peter Bogdanovich(I got to shake his hand; he was in from the set of "What's Up Doc"), John Ford(a very old man with an eyepatch) and....John Wayne and James Stewart together.
Wayne and Stewart are my big memory from that night. When we sat in the theater watching the movie, I watched THEM,and here's the best thing I saw:
On the movie screen, James Stewart is being interviewed about "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and talks about how Ford stopped shooting to humiliate him for saying that Woody Strode in old man make-up "Looked a little like Uncle Remus."
The whole theater erupted in laughter at this interview scene, but John Wayne was laughing so hard, he literally slapped Stewart on the back so hard Stewart's eyeglasses flew off into the aisle and Wayne had to retrieve them.
John Wayne was laughing and happy all through the screening, I expect he'd had a couple of tall ones, but it was great.
---
Like you I love these stories of alternate casting, production and the like. It's fun to see who was offered or considered for a role and to speculate on how a film would have turned out with others in the cast.
---
I think so. One realizes how often the first choice for a role WASN'T available, or turned it down, and one wonders about what the other movie would have been like.
Interesting about Rio Bravo: John Wayne was always to play John T. Chance, but look at this list(from Eyeman's book) of who was considered for the Dean Martin part of Dude other than Martin:
Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Cary Grant, William Holden, Monty Clift, Henry Fonda, Van Johnson, and Richard Widmark.
In short, EVERYBODY. But Cary Grant always did want to do a Western, him opposite Wayne might have been something to see.
Spencer Tracy or James Cagney in the role would have added age to the mix; Tony Curtis would have been a bit TOO young.
---
But I never heard of Tracy being offered The Magnificent Seven. His unsuitability for the role aside, he was 60 and in increasingly bad physical shape. Not a good idea. But I'm sure the reason his name was raised is that he and the film's producer-director, John Sturges, were old pals. Sturges had helmed several pictures with Tracy at MGM, climaxing with Bad Day at Black Rock, and Tracy later got Sturges to replace Fred Zinnemann on a most unlikely Struges project, The Old Man and the Sea.
---
Well, the Tracy-Sturges connection certainly makes sense -- so often in Hollywood, certain stars do certain movies just to work with their friends.
As we know, from 1960 through his death in 1967, Spencer Tracy only made five films -- and four of them were for Stanley Kramer, who, Tracy said in the sixties was "the only guy willing to hire me"(Tracy's severe health problems made him near uninsurable.) The fifth film was a volcano movie with Frank Sinatra, a Tracy pal who none-the-less often was a no-show on the soundstage, leading Tracy to one day tell the press: "Today I played a scene opposite a wooden stick to look at that was standing in for my co-star, Frank Sinatra. I think the stick may have been a better actor to work with." Then Tracy laughed.
---
(I do have to differ with you about the lead samurai in Seven Samurai. That character was not "an old man". A seasoned one, but not old -- he was physically more capable than the rest. The actor who played him, Takashi Shimura, was 49 in 1954 but obviously very vigorous.
---
Oh, OK. I guess I just saw the "white hair" connection with Tracy.
---
Curiously, while his part was the cognate of the later Brynner starring role, he was the second lead below Toshiro Mifune, who had what became the Steve McQueen character; yet McQueen was third in TMS's cast.)
---
Interesting. Well, McQueen was billed third I think because at the time Eli Wallach(the villainous Caldera) was the bigger name.
---
I've often wondered if the bigger stars who turned down roles in The High and the Mighty ever regretted it once the film was such a huge hit.
---
Probably. The world of Hollywood actors, directors, and studio executives can lead to a lot of stomach acid being burned I would guess. They say "no" to certain scripts and watch them become blockbusters and watch OTHER actors win Oscars for their roles. (Though Bette Midler once graciously said of Kathy Bates winning the Oscar for the psycho role in "Misery" that she turned down: "If I had done it, maybe I would not have been good enough to win an Oscar.")
---
I suspect so, particularly those (like Stanwyck or Crawford) whose careers were beginning to slip a little. Even in a smallish part, it never hurts to be in a hit.
---
Yes, but as you note, stars of any magnitude don't want small parts unless -- said Charlton Heston -- they were in disaster movies. Said Heston, " You get big paychecks and top billing for a short part." And The High and the Mighty kinda WAS a disaster movie(an "averted disaster" movie.)
--
Though I've read that making it was exceedingly tedious -- because of the nature and structure of the film, the actors had to sit for long hours in the cabin scenes not doing anything while someone else's scenes were being shot. In watching it I've thought about that. Quite often the others are just sitting in the background basically doing nothing.
---
That's true. They have to be in the "background shots." Oh, well, they got paid to sit!
---
On the other hand, Wayne-Fellows certainly took in more profits by having to use lesser names. The company paid them much less than they would have a top star, and no profit-sharing of course, so there must have been hundreds of thousands if not perhaps a million in savings even before the picture came out!
---
Yep. Very astute. Generally, lesser stars can be used when the producers know they have a "surefire story" that IS the star. I think that's what happened here. Plus the odd bonus of Dimitri Tiomkin's music and theme song being so prominent, not unlike they were in "High Noon." You might say the score is a "star" in "The High and the Mighty." (As Bernard Herrmann's scores were for Vertigo and Psycho.)
---
---
Actually, I'm pretty sure Wayne only had to step in to take over roles in his company's films on those three occasions: Hondo, The High and the Mighty and Blood Alley.
---
OK. I'm known in my posts for "sweeping statements" for which I welcome clarification. Perhaps I meant that at least Wayne knew for ANY of the movies he produced, he was the one star who would say "yes" to a script if he had to(as long as the role fit; and it sounds like his company picked movies he could be in, even if he chose not to, as with Seven Men from Now. I think that was developed FOR Wayne for awhile, and then he said, "no, let's find somebody else to do it".)
---
His company made a lot of films with other actors. The film Glenn Ford was in was Plunder of the Sun, on which he had such a bad time with director John Farrow that he backed out of Hondo.
---
The Eyeman book gets into the terror of Wayne's production company over Ford suggesting he wanted something for playing the role in addition to a paycheck. They were worried it would be an expensive car, but it was something much smaller, I can't remember what.
---
Randolph Scott was in Seven Men From Now, which fortuitously united him with Budd Boetticher, but I wonder whether one reason Wayne shied away from that role was that he had hired his ex-girlfriend Gail Russell to play the female lead and didn't want any on-set issues with her, since she was on a downward spiral by then.
---
Hmm. Yes, there is a fair amount about Russell in the Eyeman book...but not that speculation on that movie.
---
It also occurs to me that Robert Stack had earlier starred in a W-F film, Bullfighter and the Lady in 1951, which might have given him a boost for THATM. Have you seen that one? Boetticher directed it too. It was severely cut some time after its release but has been restored and is a very good film indeed. It's also the movie that introduced Boetticher to bullfighting, which would have disastrous consequences for him and his career a decade later.
---
I have not seen The Bullfighter and the Lady, and I am intrigued: how did Boetticher's bullfighting interest damage his career?
The Eyeman book gets into how Boetticher developed a property for Wayne's Batjac production boss(his son Michael Wayne) in the seventies, one that Boettiecer thought he was going to get to direct, but wasn't, as it turned out. Then the whole movie fell apart and NOBODY directed it!
reply
share