One thing that bugs me is casting families in movies. Hollywood tends to cast actors based on the notion “they have the same hair color, they can be related” even though the actors resemble one another not at all in features, body types, eye colors, accents, etc. One example is Gladiator, where the Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) looked nothing like his sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen).
On the other hand, the casting of Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) and his son Harry (James Franco) in the Spider-Man movies was spot-on. Even the actors commented on how much they resembled each other.
Robert de Niro on The adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle; I was boringly looking at that movie once and here comes the guy in scene… a great WTF?! moment if you ask me.
I’m old enough to have seen that John Wayne special when it first aired. What you may not understand is that it was mostly a collection of comedy sketches!
Lorne Greene played George Washington (not John Adams). He was hosting a reception when Jack Benny came in and asked the President if it’s true that he once threw a silver dollar across the Potomac. Lorne/George laughingly answers “No, I never did that. I’m afraid that’s just a legend.” Benny beamed and said, “Good- then this dollar I found on the shore of the Potomac is MINE!”
Get the idea- this wasn’t supposed to be a serious re-creation of history. Rather, it was a comedy special that used a lot of NBC stars in bit parts in sketches about historical figures.
Lorene Greene’s TV “son” Dan Blocker was in the show also, as the chief of the Indians who sold Manhatan to the Dutch for $24. Joh nWayne interrupted the deal to show the chief what Manhattan would be like in a few centuries, and then asked, “Don’t you think someone is being cheated here?” Blocker agreed- New York looked like a hellhole to him, so he gave the Dutch a discount.
I thought all the actors playing the Corleone brothers in The Godfather were brilliant in those roles, but Al Pacino, James Caan, and John Cazale don’t look anything like each other. I look at Mama and Vito Corleone, (esp. when you consider the young Vito bore a striking resemblance to Robert De Niro) and I’m supposed to think that Vito fathered Sonny? Wassamatta wit’ choo?
Not her dad; her brother. Earl Billings played her dad; he’s 26 years older than she.
The movie King Richard and the Crusaders (loosely based on the Sir Walter Scott novel The Talisman) gives us the suave George Sanders as Richard I, and blue-eyed devil Rex Harrison as Saladin.
In Field of Dreams you have New Jersey Italian Ray Liotta playing South Carolina country boy Shoeless Joe Jackson (and making absolutely no effort to be anything other than a New Jersey Italian).
Nobody’s mentioned well-known Rat Packer and boozehound Dean Martin playing an airline pilot in the original Airport? Around the time it came out (1970?) he was hosting his own show, which took place in Dean’s swinging bachelor pad where the drinks were always flowing, and sexy Golddiggers danced.
So upon hearing that Dean Martin was playing an airline pilot, you half expected to find him leaving the cockpit, grabbbing a cocktail from a stewardess (and possibly grabbing the stewardess), and making polite but loaded-with-innuendo chitchat with the passengers.
Nope. He played it straight and did fairly well with it too. Good for him, but it just seemed to be a weird casting choice at the time.
There’s actually a reason for that - it is much easier and cheaper to cast > 18 year olds in teenager roles, thanks to union and labor rules. In a couple of years, or a change in appearance, or a screwup by the casting director, and they do look a bit long in the tooth.
I’d love to see The Story of Mankind again (I saw it when it came out - it might be the first movie I remember being taken to - at a drive in.) That and **Hellzapoppin ** are the top two I’m on the lookout for.
Kirk Douglas as a Sicilian Mafia boss in The Brotherhood. A fine actor, but Sicilian? Gedoudahere!
(BTW this was the movie that almost sunk The Godfather before it was made. Studios were chary of another Mafia movie when the earlier one had bombed bigtime.)
One of the casting folks had seen Pierce in the short-lived TV show “The Powers That Be,” asked his agent to send the info over and Fraiser went from being an only child to having a younger brother, because the resemblance was too good to pass up.
I remember seeing it back then, too! IIRC, one bit went like this:
Dean Martin as Eli Whitney showing off his new invention.
“I call it the Cotton Beer.”
“Don’t you mean the Cotton Gin?”
“No–it doesn’t take me sixteen Clydesdales to pull a Martini.”
Everyone except Alan Rickman in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.
Hugh Laurie auditioned for House while on location filming Flight OTP. His character in Sense and Sensibility (Mr Palmer) is also andtisocial, sarcastic and ultimately sympathetic. I know FAR TOO MUCH about this.
My personal WTF casting decision is Val Kilmer in The Saint even after all these years it still makes my bits clench. How could they?