Since I’ve been on a bit of a vacation this week, I’ll apologize in advance for the delightful lack of verbosity in this blog. As many of my fellow woolgatherers do at this time of year, I’ve shirked my duty to remain an informed and permanently outraged citizen of this republic, or even an observant movie fan.

Instead, I’ve contemplated the resemblance of that cloud on the horizon to a winged horse, the number of butterflies in a quiet meadow, and the best way to cook an ear of fresh corn.

In between these bemused thoughts, it’s occurred to me that I’ve recently come across a number of stories that indicate quite a few near misses in the casting department in the studio era. Perhaps you might enjoy these “what might have beens” as well and can contribute other tales from golden era, (or at least the silver age) of film related to role selections.

Director Robert Wise is said to have approached two fine actors for the role ultimately played so well by the other worldly (and far less well known and costly) Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Though the leading character actor Claude Rains was said to be Wise’s first casting choice for the beloved classic science fiction film, encompassing themes of peace, eternity and our place in the universe, (as well as some intriguing McCarthy era takes on the human capacity for paranoia), Rains‘ commitment to appear on Broadway in an adaptation of Arnold Koestler’s Darkness at Noon at the time of the film’s production may have prevented him from appearing as Klaatu, though I like to think he’d have brought a fine sense of irony and mischief to the part.

It also didn’t hurt that Rennie was under contract to 20th Century Fox, helping Mr. Wise stay well within his original budget.

Less well known, but equally enticing to the imagination is the fact that Spencer Tracy was said to have been seriously considered for the role of the space man Klaatu. Mr. Tracy, whose humanity and naturalism on screen ranks him among the best actors, really seems to be a choice from out of left field for this part–though both he and Rains would have lent some older gravitas to the role too.

Tracy, whose health problems may have affected some of his decisions, reportedly didn’t want to be upstaged by a robot. He turned the part down, as he did several others that could have taken the somewhat disreputable genre in an unexpected direction.  It certainly would have been interesting to see this earthy actor in sci-fi. Today, of course, many highly respected actors, such as Morgan Freeman readily take parts in sci-fi films–if the role is well written.

In the same period in the ’50s, Mr. Tracy turned down the role of the haunted older co-pilot who saves everyone’s bacon in William Wellman’s clichéd yet entertaining production of airborne stereotypes, The High and The Mighty (1954). Mr. Tracy, who had a run-in or two with the feisty director during their younger days in Hollywood, was said to have turned down the role due to “creative differences.” Perhaps he read the script and counted his own lines, which were very few, though significant. Or maybe he just couldn’t whistle. In any case, Spence handed John Wayne one of his best non-Western parts in the fifties.

Later in that decade, Tracy was set to appear opposite Humphrey Bogart for the first time on screen since they’d broken into feature films together in John Ford’s Up the River (1930). As director William Wyler prepared to film the Broadway hit, The Desperate Hours (1955), he learned that Humphrey Bogart was very interested in playing the ringleader of a desperate band of prison escapees holding a middle class family hostage in their home. Though the part was played by a decades younger Paul Newman on stage, Wyler began to see the commercial and artistic possibilities of casting a still edgy Bogie as the aging thug, if he could find a comparably talented co-star as the distressed family patriarch. According to the director, Tracy “liked the script and said okay. Only we could never make the deal because we could never solve the billing. It was really stupid. Each one said ‘My name goes first.’ As if the public cared.” Wyler had privately hoped to persuade Marlon Brando or James Dean to play the part of the convict, with Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda as the father. Ultimately, Fredric March, who was very effective, played the juicy part of the beleaguered family man opposite Bogart’s desperate, bitter criminal, which proved to be the star’s swan song as one of the best of the bad guys on screen. The director’s biographer, Jan Herman, felt that Wyler regarded The Desperate Hours as among his lesser works, though, if you catch it on Sept. 15 at 4:30pm or Oct. 28 at 8am on TCM, you can judge how well the stars fulfill their roles. Fredric March, who achieved some real life desperation thanks to Wyler’s repeated requests for multiple takes, particularly in the scene when he said goodbye to his wife (Martha Scott), was also almost cast in a few high profile projects during his career. Two of the best known are the part of the runaway monk in The Garden of Allah (1936), (a thankless part eventually played as well as possible by Charles Boyer), and even earlier, the part of the brash reporter in It Happened One Night (1934). A Mr. Gable reluctantly brought that one to life.

Probably two of the more costly casting decisions affecting Mr. Tracy’s career were for roles when he was in his prime and when he was nearing the end of his career. In the forties, Spencer Tracy, cast opposite Anne Revere, had actually begun some preliminary work for MGM on the adaptation of Margaret Kinnan Rawlings’ tale, The Yearling in 1941. After numerous difficulties on the Florida location of the film, including a very cranky star, plagues of mosquitoes, conflicts between the director Victor Fleming and the producer, Sidney Franklin, the growth spurt and difficult to record Southern accent of the boy cast in the role later filled by Claude Jarman, Jr. The entrance of the U.S. into WWII brought the production to a halt, reportedly at a loss of approximately half a million dollars. All of Tracy’s filmed scenes for the movie were scrapped, and even though there are reports that the actor was asked by the studio to try the role again some years later, he gave it a pass. When the story was eventually translated to the screen after the war, the filmmakers, under the direction of Clarence Brown, used some of the scenes shot in ‘41 showing the Florida flora and fauna in the 1946 movie that eventually starred Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman and young Mr. Jarman.

Speaking of Gregory Peck, did you know that his starring role in the comedy Designing Woman (1957) was originally intended for James Stewart? That elegant leading lady of the fifties, Grace Kelly, who preferred to marry a prince rather than be a mere movie star, had been slated to appear opposite Mr. Stewart in the film prior to the Lauren Bacall-Gregory Peck teaming. Mr. Peck reportedly had been considered for the part that Gary Cooper immortalized in High Noon. A bit leery of the genre after his earlier forays into Westerns, in 1950’s The Gunfighter (a commercial failure, though a good film), and the wildly melodramatic Duel in the Sun (1946), Peck turned down the role of the hard-pressed marshal in Fred Zinnemann’s movie. Later in his career, the actor eagerly sought the part of the repressed Irish schoolteacher in Ryan’s Daughter (1970), but was disheartened when Robert Mitchum won the role. Peck might have brought a gentle wistfulness to that part, though, some viewers appreciated Mitchum trying to broaden his range by playing someone so different from his usual roles.

Director Alfred Hitchcock, who was quite taken with Jimmy Stewart after working with him in their challenging initial project, Rope (1948), also tried to persuade him to appear as the priest in I Confess (in a role that blessedly went to the credibly spiritually conflicted Montgomery Clift), as well as North By Northwest, (which was amply filled by the gifted Cary Grant). While researching last week’s blog on James Stewart, I was tickled to discover that, as a young MGM contract contractee, at about 139 pounds and 6′3″, and as identifiably American as corn on the cob and a hot dog on the 4th of July, Jimmy was tested for a role in Pearl S. Buck’s epic of Chinese peasant life, The Good Earth. According to Stewart, this “highlight” of his early film career meant that the “makeup took all morning. They put a bald cap on my head, yanked my eyelids with spirit gum, and trimmed my eyelashes. That was bad enough, but I was too tall, so they had to dig a trench which I walked in as I trudged alongside the film’s star, Paul Muni. Then Muni started losing his balance, and one time tripped and fell right down into the ditch. After three days of tests, Mayer finally called a halt and gave the part to Keye Luke.”

While the world was spared the dubious artistic pleasure of seeing Mr. Stewart impersonating an Asian, it’s understandable that in the studio era, the management wanted to see all their personnel busy.

Still, one wonders if the lads in the Thalberg building thought of him for this unlikely role because he was one of the few actors around who looked as though he might pass as a person who’d known a famine first hand.

Cary Grant has to be the all time champ when it comes to turning down plum roles. There was Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady*, which Grant turned down flat, explaining that if anyone other than Rex Harrison dared to play the part, he would not see the movie. Apparently, three directors who were constantly throwing scripts over Cary Grant’s garden wall were Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and David Lean. Hitchcock offered Grant the leads in a never produced version of Greenmantle, (an adaptation of John Buchan’s novel. Buchan is the author of “The Thirty-Nine Steps”, which Hitch had made into an international hit with Robert Donat), Mr. and Mrs. Smith , Spellbound, Rope, I Confess, Dial M for Murder, The Birds, Torn Curtain, and most interestingly, a modern dress Hamlet that was never made. Whew!

Billy Wilder says that he wrote the scripts for Sabrina (1951), Love in the Afternoon and One, Two, Three with Grant in mind.

David Lean wanted Grant for The Bridge Over the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. And then there were the times that other directors offered Mr. Grant leading roles in The Third Man, A Star is Born(1954), Roman Holiday, Phantom of the Opera (1962), Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Mary Poppins, Lolita, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

When it was time for the film version of the Broadway musical smash, The Music Man, astonishingly, the filmmakers were concerned about box-office appeal and originally offered the part of Professor Harold Hill to none other than Cary Grant. To his credit, Grant told them, “Not only won’t I play it, but unless Robert Preston plays it, I won’t even go to see the picture.”

Brother! The only parts that Grant doesn’t seem to have been offered were those of Lassie and Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s a good thing that Mr. Grant understood the meanings of “overexposure” and “leave the audience wanting more”.
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Sources:

Dewey, Donald, James Stewart: A Biography, Turner Publishing, Inc., 1996.
Eyman, Scott, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer, Robson, 2005.
Herman, Jan, A Talent for Trouble: William Wyler, Da Capo Press, 1997.
Warren, Bill, Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, McFarland, 1997.