When Blake Edwards was pondering who should play Mr. Yunioshi, Holly Golightly’s Japanese neighbor, in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961), did he call central casting and ask for suggestions? Or did he come up with his own ideas, running through such choices as  Benson Fong, Philip Ahn, Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura and others before arriving at the most logical choice…..Mickey Rooney. HUH?   

Rooney’s manic, exaggerated caricature in the film seems like it was intended for a very different movie and stands out like a flashing neon sign whenever the Mickster is on screen, yelling “Miss  Gorightry!” through oversized buck teeth. Besides the movie’s depiction of Mr. Yunioshi as a glaring stereotype, the way Rooney plays it is so extreme that it becomes highly entertaining and memorable for all the wrong reasons. And it’s certainly not the image most people have of this iconic comedy-romance-drama from the sixties…but it’s Mr. Yunioshi who flashes to mind when I think of it. Ok, I admit I’m damaged.

Still, it makes you wonder about the casting process of any film and famously wrong-headed choices could be due to any number of reasons: a contract player who had no choice but to do the role despite their resistance, a talent agent-producer deal that was an attempt to broaden their star’s range or popularity, an actor’s desire to challenge himself, or a completely opportunistic choice based on money and exposure. Spend 6 hours a day in makeup to look like an ape or change my image from virginal prom queen to killer whore for $500,000? Sold!

In the case of Mickey Rooney in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S it was probably the money and the fact that he hadn’t appeared in a high profile, big budget movie in some time. At that point in his career, he was working in both television and B-movies such as THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ADAM AND EVE (1960) and KING OF THE ROARING 20’s – THE STORY OF ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN (1961) so Blake Edwards’ offer would have been a big step up from those.

In his autobiography, Life is Too Short, Rooney wrote, “I was downright ashamed of my role in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S…and I don’t think the director, Blake Edwards, was very proud of it either. I was too cute as, get this, an eccentric Japanese fashion photographer living in a posh New York apartment, and the whole damn movie was just too precious. Audrey Hepburn played a high-priced hooker. You had to read Truman Capote’s story to know that; you wouldn’t have known it from watching the movie.”

Here are some more of my favorite eclectic casting decisions that come to mind when I think of actors in roles that are so bizarre or inappropriate you just go, “What the %#@$!” Occasionally this kind of “creative” casting works in spite of itself and helps revive an actor’s career or takes them to new heights in popularity such as Dean Stockwell in David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET and Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?

But it’s more likely to be something like this.

Betsy Palmer was a perky, attractive ingenue in the fifties who enjoyed the limelight briefly in such films as MISTER ROBERTS (1955), opposite Jack Lemmon, and dramatic vehicles like QUEEN BEE (1955) and THE TIN STAR (1957). Never a major star, she drifted into television work but her career seemed over by the time she made a cameo appearance in 1972 in an episode of the TV show, “Love, American Style.” Then nothing….until 1980 when producer/director Sean S. Cunningham said, “Hey, we need a big Hollywood name to play Mrs. Voorhees in FRIDAY THE 13^TH.” Okay, so they couldn’t afford a big Hollywood name but they got Betsy Palmer and that’s why anyone born after 1960 probably knows who she is today. Killkillkillkillkillkill………

Paul Newman was probably fed up with being hyped as a male sex object by the early sixties, even though he had already proven that he was an impressive actor with two Oscar nominations under his belt for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and The Hustler (1961). So what does he do after Sweet Bird of Youth in 1962? He decides to take a small role in a sprawling, episodic literary adaptation called HEMINGWAY’S ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN (1962) and play a beat-up, broken-down, middle-aged ex-boxer turned bum known as “The Battler.” It was a character he had actually played before in a 1955 TV episode for Playwrights ’56, based on an Ernest Hemingway short story, and it led to his being cast as boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me the next year. But his return to the same role, which was little more than a vignette in the 1962 film, was an odd detour nevertheless. According to Shawn Levy’s recent bio of Newman, “His agents at MCA weren’t too happy with his choice. He was highly marketable at the moment, and they could find lots of well-paid jobs for him if he’d let them. “They said I was a star,” he remembered. “I couldn’t cheapen myself by playing a bit part.” Well, he showed them…and us. It might have been an attempt to sink into a secondary role just for the challenge and love of acting but it certainly alienated his female fans. It was Newman at his most unglamorous and unappealing, his handsome looks buried under very unconvincing makeup. And he was playing opposite Richard Beymer, who was ill-equipped to carry the dramatic burden of the film. Worse of all, Newman barely made an impression in the role except for his grotesque appearance.  The film was universally panned and the entry for it in Leonard Maltin’s TV guide dismisses it as “pretentious…..overblown, cornball and embarrassing.” It’s all those things and probably looks much worse and more puzzling now than then. But Newman quickly moved on and Hud was his next picture, making him an even bigger star in a role where he played a cynical son-of-a-bitch and borderline sociopath.

Esther Williams as a high school music teacher being stalked by one of her students? That’s the premise of THE UNGUARDED MOMENT (1956), the first film Williams made after she left MGM and an obvious attempt to break away from her image as the queen of aqua musicals. It’s enormously entertaining as trashy melodrama with Williams fending off the sexual advances of bad boy student John Saxon but his father (Edward Andrews) turns out to be even worse and is later revealed as a sex pervert who breaks into Williams’ home, hides in her closet and watches her undress before attacking her. Williams is stiff and often ill-at-ease in the movie and reminds you of just how natural and relaxed she was while swimming in those MGM musicals. It was an unlikely role choice for her but THE UNGUARDED MOMENT was quite typical of the lurid soap operas being released by Universal during this period, which also included The Female Animal (1958) and Raw Wind in Eden (1958), also starring Esther Williams in an overheated love triangle melodrama.

By the time ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES came along in 1971, Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter were firmly entrenched as the true stars of the series and this one marked their third appearance in the franchise. But who was that actor in the ape makeup named Milo? Sal Mineo is practically unrecognizable here and it’s one of his final feature films. While I mean no disrespect to this third entry in the Apes saga, which I am quite fond of, this movie must have been quite a humbling experience for the twice-Oscar nominated Mineo, who at this point in his career was grabbing any freelance TV and film work he could find such as singer Wayne Newton’s feature film debut 80 Steps to Jonah (1969) – Mineo received sixth place billing under Mickey Rooney (him again!). Adding insult to injury, Mineo’s character in ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES is killed off in the first third of the film – he gets strangled by a gorilla in the Los Angeles Zoo. Are the rumors true that this is being remade?

For her last screen appearance, Jennifer Jones joined an all-star cast, most of whom were served up as guest victims or muppets on fire, in the expensive disaster flick THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974); it was so costly in fact, that it required two studios to join forces to produce it (Warner Bros. & 20th Century Fox). William Holden, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner and Fred Astaire (who, surprisingly, was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this) are completely wasted in the cookie cutter storyline but the worst indignity was reserved for Jennifer Jones who gets stuck in an exterior glass elevator at the top of the title skyscraper and is then hurled to her death far below. Talk about a final swan song. There is something so gratuitous about the treatment of her character that it becomes a commentary on how veterans stars are exploited by Hollywood – and Irwin Allen – in the name of entertainment.

Jimmy Stewart as a circus clown? Do you think he read the script of THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952) and said, “I must play Buttons the clown”? Like THE TOWERING INFERNO, Cecil B. DeMille’s circus epic is another all-star affair and Stewart’s role is little more than a cameo with almost no dialogue. Despite the above photo, Buttons is NOT a happy clown and his unfortunate backstory is revealed toward the end of the film; it’s not one of Stewart’s finest moments in acting and nothing more than a pit stop between No Highway in the Sky (1951) and Bend in the River (1952).

You won’t find a more perverse use of well known actors than in Orson Welles’ baroque and twisted film noir, TOUCH OF EVIL (1958). Besides casting himself as a corrupt, grossly overweight cop with a weakness for candy bars, there’s Dennis Weaver as the looney manager of a fleabag motel, Mercedes McCambridge as a butch gang leader with slicked-back hair, Zsa Zsa Gabor as a strip club owner, and Charlton Heston as a Mexican – all examples of the movie’s eccentric casting. My favorite though is Marlene Dietrich as Tanya, a gypsy fortune teller who gets her own theme song (by Henry Mancini) and has some of the best dialogue in the movie, especially the enigmatic closing line when she stares down at Welles’ lifeless body, floating in the canal, “He was some kind of a man…What does it matter what you say about people?”

Rarely revived today, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (1970) is from Vincente Minnelli’s later period and has its cult followers due to the subject matter (reincarnation), psychedelic-era influences and a lush, overproduced production design. Based on a semi-successful Broadway musical fantasy with a score by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, the film stars Barbra Streisand as a chain-smoker who hopes a psychiatrist (Yves Montand) can help her break the habit. Instead, Montand discovers, while Streisand is under hypnosis, that she has lived several past lives. The Streisand-Montand pairing doesn’t work but Jack Nicholson, who pops up in the unlikely role of Streisand’s stepbrother, a guitar-playing hippie, provides some laughs. Allegedly, a duet between Streisand and Nicholson ended up on the cutting room floor. Too bad. Still, there is novelty value in seeing Streisand and Nicholson together on the screen and, though it’s a small part, it’s worth a look for Nicholson fanatics.

The much anticipated pairing of John Travolta and Lily Tomlin in MOMENT BY MOMENT (1978) turned out to be one of the biggest boxoffice bombs for Universal in the seventies. Tomlin’s companion, writer/director Jane Wagner, tried to inject some social commentary about Southern California’s privileged white society and cultural rootlessness via an overly familiar tale of a love affair between an older woman and a younger man. But the main problem was a total lack of chemistry between the stars and a vapid script. After Tomlin’s acclaimed performances in The Late Show (1977) and Nashville (1975), MOMENT BY MOMENT was not what the public expected or wanted from her. The New York Times pinpointed the major problem in their review: “That the two stars look enough alike to be brother and sister is no help, and though Miss Wagner’s camera comes in for some tactful close-ups of flesh in the love scenes, they are singularly unerotic. One has the impression that these two lovers would prefer to be doing something else.” Tomlin would later say, “I never should have played it the way I played it. And I also think the initial intention of the movie was quite different -we just couldn’t make it come out – but we were quite innocent about it….we had no idea how the press was going to beat up on us…You couldn’t pick up a magazine for three or four years! Just when I’d think it had finally been put to rest, I’d pick up a magazine with some terrible piece about it and of course I couldn’t do an interview because you have to take that whole trip back.”

You would think that by 1969 the practice of casting Caucasians as Native Americans in movies would have been verboten but here is a blatant example of it and one of the reasons TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE never worked for me. Directed by Abraham Polonsky, a former victim of the Blacklist, this Western tale of a manhunt for a Paiute Indian wanted for the murder of his girlfriend’s father is a well-intentioned message picture about racial prejudice and social injustice. But Robert Blake and Katharine Ross are all wrong as the Native American lovers on the run. And despite Robert Redford in the starring role, the film wasn’t popular with audiences either.

TWO-FACED WOMAN (1941), Greta Garbo’s final film, might not be as disastrous as legend would have it but it certainly helped to hasten the actress’s retirement. An innocuous bit of fluff about a woman pretending to be twins in a scheme to lure back her straying husband (Melvyn Douglas), the movie is typical of many romantic comedies revolving around a mistaken identity plot. But the big question surrounding the movie is why did MGM force their most prestigious star to make a movie that was clearly beneath her talents? She already proved she could be a gifted comedienne in NINOTCHKA so there was no need to prove her expertise in this genre again with a second-rate script. Garbo is clearly ill at ease here – especially in the awkward rumba scene –  but it proved to be everyone’s last glimpse of her as well. Her comment about the film: “TWO-FACED WOMAN – they’re trying to kill me – they’ve dug my grave!”

What’s the point of hiring some of the most famous actors in Hollywood and burying them under tons of makeup? This question always arises when I see movies like Norman McLeod’s 1933 version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND with Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, Gary Cooper as the White Knight, W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty and so on. Or John Huston’s gimmicky mystery thriller, THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963) in which cameo guest stars Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas are used as “red herring” suspects – one of them turns up in drag – and part of the fun is in spotting them. In both cases, the big name casting is a stunt and bizarre enough to generate some publicity but you wonder if either film would have been worth doing without their participation.

I could go on with other offbeat casting choices such as Alec Guinness in A MAJORITY OF ONE (1962), Lauren Bacall in Robert Altman’s HEALTH (1980), Peter Lorre in SILK STOCKINGS (1957) and Margot Kidder in THE REINCARNATION OF PETER PROUD (1975) but would like to hear from readers about their favorites.