John Wayne Book:

Editorial Review:
Just what were they thinking when they cast John Wayne as Genghis Khan? Or Sharon Stone as a frigid housewife? Or Frank Sinatra as a vengeful cowboy? Each of the entries in this fun book gleefully dissects the mismatch of performer and role, and delves into the film's production, examining the screwy thinking that led to the ill-fated pick in the first place. Photos.

Starring John Wayne As Genghis Khan: Hollywood's All-Time Worst Casting Blunders Reviews:
Starring John Wayne As Genghis Khan
2005-09-04 - Damien Bona's `Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan!' (which seems to be the same book as the alternatively titled `Starring Demi Moore As Hester Prynne') is a disposable celebration of the notorious - and some not-so-notorious - instances of miscasting. Like other `best of,' `worst of,' and `100 biggest' listings `Starring John Wayne...' is highly personal and idiosyncratic. Even though Bona says in his introduction "(t)o be miscast, an actor has to have spent the bulk of his or her career well cast - he can't really be wrong for a role until he has established a personality strong enough to mark him as ill suited for it," these type of books are never complete or immune from charges of omission. That's part of their charm, in fact.

The book is divided into seven sections. Each section contains a number of short essays, 5000 words or so, on the offending star and movie. The first section is entitled "Waxworks: The most unconvincing portrayals of historical figures ever captured on film" and begins with an essay on William Bendix in `The Babe Ruth Story.' Bendix "plays the character as a wide-eyed dope," Bona observes, which is hard to argue with. Bendix may have been miscast, but Bona is silent about John Goodman's portrayal of The Babe in the movie of the same name. `The Babe' was released in 1992, four years before `Starring John Wayne...' was published, and is every inch a classically miscast movie as the Bendix movie. This isn't to say Bona is wrong or even inaccurate, but books of this type are never the last word on a subject. Bona has some selections that I disagree with. He doesn't like Jack Lemmon in `Cowboy' ("Not an actor who fits comfortably into a period film, Lemmon isn't very convincing at any of this.") and I think Lemmon was very effective as a hotel clerk, a greenhorn, who wants to go on a cattle drive. Perhaps the most astonishing instance of miscasting, in Bona's view, is Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in `Rain Man.' Age differences and physical dissimilarities are the culprits. "Look at their body frames, " Bona writes, "their sizes, their eyes. No way did they have the same parents. And although each boasts a prominent nose, they are differently shaped - Hoffman's wide and long, Cruise's more classically Roman." Er... okay. Perhaps, but I'd rather have seen mentioned Laurence Olivier as Gen. Douglas MacArthur in `Inchon', an uncomfortable looking Clint Eastwood as a singing cowboy in `Paint Your Wagon,' or Kevin Costner as a decidedly un-British Robin Hood. Or Donald O'Connor as Buster Keaton, or James Cagney as Lon Chaney. None of these guys are in the book, although any of them belong there.

Still, `Starring John Wayne...' contains interesting tidbits about each miscast movie and star. I was delighted to see that Gregory Peck, along with Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis, made it into the three-man Miscasting Hall of Fame. Although I'm a fan of some of Peck's movies, I think Bona gets it just right when he notes, after a nod to some of Peck's greater movies, that "(w)hen his material is not... strong, ..., or when he's trying to play someone whose sense of moral rectitude is less than impeccable, Peck's disinclination to sound like anyone other than Gregory Peck is jarring." As these things go `Starring John Wayne...' is a good book and a fun read, particularly suited for those who are fans of older movies.




At least it wasn't Starring Shirley Temple as Norma Desmond!
2004-06-04 - What makes a good movie "good" or a great movie "great"?

The answer, of course, is, "many things." You have to have a good story, a well-written script (ideally with memorable lines and lots of linear logic!), a director with a fine eye for detail and organizational skills that rival Ike's before D-Day, a well-trained crew, a well-versed composer, a top-notch special-effects team, and a visionary producer with a dream in his mind and a deep pocket to match (but at the same time have better fiscal discipline than some Presidents).

Have I forgotten anything? Oh, yeah. And you gotta have a good cast.

Let's face it. Until the late 1960s, we did not go to see the latest Michael Curtiz or Victor Fleming picture like we go watch the new one from Spielberg or, God forbid, the latest Michael Bay offering. No, we (or our parents and grandparents) went to see the new Gable and Lombard flick at the Bijou or Rialto. If you went to a John Wayne picture -- as millions of Americans did from 1939 until 1976 -- you knew he'd be either a stalwart cowboy or Marine sergeant or even a colonel in the 82nd Airborne. And, by gum, you believed him in those roles, even when he seemed (as he does in The Longest Day) a bit too old for the role.

So, casting is important, and many great movies are great because the casting decisions were inspired and sound.

Yet, as Damien Bona illustrates in "Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan: Hollywood's All-Time Casting Blunders," sometimes inspiration took a left turn at Sunset Boulevard and ended up in the pool with Joe Gillis' corpse. Whoever thought up the idea of casting the Duke as Temujin, the Mongol warlord better known as Genghis Khan (or Susan Hayward as a Tartar woman named Bortai) in 1956's The Conqueror must have been smoking something other than tobacco cigarettes. The sight and sound of John Wayne dressed up in Mongol warrior garb and spouting lines originally intended for Marlon Brando make one shudder. Suffice it to say that this picture was not a big hit.

Bona aims his acidly-witty verbal darts at such casting blunders as:

Marlon Brando as an Okinawan in Teahouse of the August Moon

June Allyson as a sapphic murderer in They Only Kill Their Masters

Tony Bennett in The Oscar

Robert Redford as a British aristocrat who, in real life, was also bald in Out of Africa

Michael Keaton as Batman

My personal favorite chapter is devoted to Gregory Peck, who was extremely talented but was also miscast in quite a few movies, including Moby Dick and The Boys from Brazil. Boma points out that most of Peck's miscasts did not come from his acting but from his voice and persona. In Days of Glory, a 1944 movie about Russian partisans fighting off German invaders, he speaks in a distinctly American accent. The one time where he does use a heavy German accent is in The Boys from Brazil, a 1978 flick about Josef Mengele and his plot to create some 90 or so clones of Adolf Hitler to create a Fourth Reich. Not only is the makeup overly done, Bona says, but Peck overacts, much to the detriment of the film.

Bona's style is both informative -- I had never even heard of Tony Bennett acting in a movie --- and irreverent. His chapters are brief (averaging at no more than four pages) and have clever tag lines (the one for John Wayne's The Conqueror is "Mongol Cowboy") that sum up the miscasting's overall effect. Biting yet never overly mean, Boma makes the reader laugh out loud while at the same time wondering what some of those casting directors were indeed, thinking...or smoking.

Alex Diaz-Granados

very entertaining!
1998-11-13 - A cynical and hilarious look at actors and actresses who were miscast. Lucille Ball, Donna Reed, Marlon Brando, Richard Gere, Demi Moore--a real variety of performers who for various reasons ended up in roles that were all wrong for them! This book also includes the story-behind-the-story, as in, *why* John Wayne ended up playing Genghis Khan. An interesting and enjoyable book!

Interesting, informative and witty
1998-03-20 - An almost exhaustive guide to those truly bad-casting decisions that are so bad, they're good. Many a film noir has been reduced to slapstick because of the decision by the casting agent.