Orgriginaly Old blue eyes was going to play dirty harry.do you think th
is would of worked?
Cranky Harry? Frankly, no.
While I enjoyed Sinatra in Manchurian Candidate and other stuff and have no problems with him as an actor, I think Clint gave Harry Callaghan an easy physicality. He’d already built his reputation through the spaghetti westerns and brought parts of that taciturn delivery, toughness and slightly mystical prescience to Dirt Harry. While Sinatra would have just done it differently, I’m not sure it would not have become an iconic character, and a multi-movie saga.
Sinatra was 56 years old when that movie was made, and he was already starting to look jowly and soft by then. Eastwood was 41 and in good physical shape. As a rogue cop with a bad attitude, he was perfect. Sinatra was more of the smooth operator type in that genre of films. It wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.
Ten years earlier? Maybe.
In a related anecdote, Bing Crosby was offered the part of Columbo, but turned it down. Columbo - Wikipedia
John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, George C Scott, Robert Mitchum, and Paul Newman also passed on the role. Most because the movie was considered right wing and too filled with violence.
Too right-wing for John Wayne? Although I could see Wayne objecting to a cop who breaks the rules like torturing the suspect (stepping on his wound in the Keyser Stadium scene).
By chance I recently saw a clip of Kirk Douglas on the Dick Cavett show talking about working with Wayne, he basically said they were good friends but never talked politics.
John Wayne appeared in a copy cat dirty harry film.in the 70s
You mean Brannigan ? Here’s a clip of him of him asking Baldrick if he feels lucky.
Well… asking a pre-Blackadder Tony Robinson if he can swim, but same thing.
Was that also Richard Bucket (Boo-kay) in that clip?
Of those, I could only see Mitchum pulling it off.
Nope - Richard Attenborough.
Well, we did kinda-sorta get Sinatra as John McClane.
I was going to say…Sinatra could have made Dirty Harry work.
I’ve talked about the John McClane films before, so let me just repeat what I said. These movies were cobbled together from spare parts. The Detective was a 1968 film made from a 1966 novel of the same name. By the time the sequel (Nothing Lasts Forever) to the novel came out in 1979, Frank Sinatra was too old really to play the lead again. The script made from that novel bounced around Hollywood for years. Finally they decided to change the main character’s name, change some things in the plot, make no reference to the film The Detective, and rename the film Die Hard. It finally came out in 1988 with Bruce Willis in the lead and was a major hit. Then the filmmakers took another script that had been bouncing around Hollywood for a while which was based on a novel called 58 Minutes by a different novelist that had no relationship to the first film. They changed things in the plot and made Bruce Willis’s character the lead in the new film, which was called Die Hard 2 when it came out in 1990. It was again a big hit. They then took another script that had been bouncing around Hollywood for a while called Simon Says with no relation to the first two John McClane films. They again rewrote this in the same way as the first two films into a 1995 film called Die Hard with a Vengeance, and it was once more a big hit. They then took another script that had been bouncing around Hollywood called WW3.com and again rewrote it as a John McClane film. It came out in 2007 and was called Live Free or Die Hard and was, yes, you guessed it, a hit. They then had someone write an original script for the next movie. The new film came out in 2013 and was called A Good Day to Die Hard. This film, the only one in the series which had a script originally written to be a John McClane film, is sometimes considered the poorest one in the series.
He might have but it would’ve changed the movie’s story considerably. Instead of a cowboy cop bucking the system and bending the rules to clean up the streets it would be about an aging veteran police detective who can’t adjust to the changes in law enforcement and society in general in the post-Miranda era.
The John Wayne casting is disputed by IMDB but he appeared in two knockoffs, McQ and Brannigan.
Damn good assessment
Similarly Walter Matthau makes “Charley Varrick” work. Even if he didn’t understand it
if Sinatra sounds unwise, how about Ian Fleming wanting David Niven as 007?
The man who introduced “Some Like it Hot” on TCM last night said that Frank SInatra was the first choice for Daphne, played by Jack Lemmon. The movie would have tanked.