Posted on 12/01/2012 6:09:35 AM PST by PJ-Comix
Even good actors sometimes get horribly miscast in the wrong roles. The case most often cited is this first one in which John Wayne played an odd role for him...a Mongol warrior.
John Wayne: Miscast as Genghis Khan in "The Conqueror," the Duke had to utter lines like: "My blood says, take this Tartar woman."
Susan Hayward: Co-starring as the tartar woman love interest in "The Conqueror." Yeah, an Irish chick from Brooklyn as a Tartar woman on the Asian steppes. The closest thing about Hayward to a tartar is that she had a tart tongue.
Chuck Connors: Tall, blond, blue-eyed, Connors somehow was chosen to portray an Apache Indian barely five feet tall. Does not compute!
George Peppard: I really enjoyed watching "The Blue Max." My favorite aerial movie about WWI. However, one person just did not fit the role...George Peppard as Lt. Bruno Stachel. Peppard was simply too American to convincingly portray a German. Oh, and you don't have to be a German to portray a German since two English actors in the same movie were very convincing as German officers: James Mason and Jeremy Kemp.
Laurence Olivier: Yes, even actors at the top of the acting profession can be horribly miscast as Olivier was as General Douglas McArthur in "Inchon." Thankfully very few people have seen Olivier in his completely miscast role.
Leslie Howard: I recently saw "Gone With The Wind" again for the umpteenth time and noticed that Leslie Howard was quite long in the tooth to be playing the youthful Ashley Wilkes. And did Southern gentlemen talk with British accents?
Jimmy Stewart: Stewart was almost twice the age of the 25 year old Lindbergh when he flew solo across the Atlantic. Sorry, but mere hair dye does not make one convincingly youthful in "The Spirit of St. Louis." Actually, George Peppard would have been good in the role of Lindbergh...if he mastered Lindbergh's slightly sing-song upper Midwest accent.
Richard Burton: As Leon Trotsky in "The Assassination of Trotsky."
Charlton Heston: His miscasting in "A Touch of Evil" was so horrible that it was even referenced in "Ed Wood" when Wood ran into Orson Welles at a bar and after telling Welles about being forced to miscast roles, Welles replied: "Tell me about it. I'm supposed to do a thriller for Universal. They want Charlton Heston as a Mexican."
To each his own....
"great" though...?
I meant how funny it was that Costner’s accent comes and goes so noticabley ... he totally phoned it in on that one...lol
You don’t think his character in Zardoz was just a bit more out there than the Russian submarine officer?
I liked him in “The Wind and the Lion”. He could have kidnapped me and I wouldn’t have complained.
I was mostly referencing the fact that he is always a Scotsman no matter what role he is playing. I like him a lot but he really only ever plays “Sean Connery” no matter what the role.
I see. The “Connery-ness” does tend to present itself in his roles.
I read all the Jack Reacher novels up to and including Nothing to Lose. That one made me quit Lee Child. Haven’t read anything from him since then and never intend to.
Thanks! My memory must be giving out, because I saw the movie, and I could have sworn he said something like that.
Costner was terrible in Robin Hood, but Alan Rickman was great!
And before he hit the big time, he was pleasantly goofy in “Silverado”.
And his playing himself works pretty well in “Bull Durham”.
Before that was Fandango. Costner's performance was unremarkable, but Marvin McIntyre's performance as Truman Sparks was absolutely hilarious.
He was promoting his clothing line.
Haven’t seen that one, I see if I can get Missus Slim to put it in her Netflix queue.
It’s a fun film. Not a great one, but it has its moments. The Truman Sparks character is somewhat incidental to the plot, but IMHO steals the show.
Paul Fix as Mr. Tso in Blood Alley (1955) with John Wayne and Lauren Bacall. Fix is better known as the Marshal “Micah” in the Rifleman. And over 300 better suited roles.
Though many of the cast and crew were zonked during production, there is actually some serious science fiction in Zardoz.
In a nutshell, the world is descending into chaos, for unspecified reasons, so a group of idealistic scientists create somewhat self-sufficient enclaves behind nearly impenetrable force barriers, and devise a way to make themselves and their children immortal.
The people inside the enclaves call themselves immortals, and the humans outside, brutals, and have also created a cult of brutal killers, called exterminators, to cut down on the number of brutals, lest they figure out some way of breaking into the enclaves.
One of the immortals realizes that the world has become stagnant, that the immortals have reached their maximum intellectual abilities, and the only hope is to spend generations breeding a mutant (Connery), who can bust up the status quo. Who can intellectually go far beyond the immortals, and ruin the great AI computer that keeps them forever alive.
As a friend of mine used to say: “hey, you have ever seen that one Tom Cruise movie? You know, the one where plays The Cocky Young Guy?” :-)
“Tom Cruise plays “Tom Cruise” in every movie he’s ever been in.”
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So did John Wayne. Only the wardrobe changed(military or western}.
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THANK YOU! I've been saying the same thing since he was cast in "The Man in the Iron Mask."
Regards,
TS
Okay, my hubby put his two cents worth in with Tom Cruise as a samurai warrior in The Last Samurai.
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