Henry Fonda – Crawley's Casting Calls

Randolph Scott, Belle Starr, 1941. Hank refused to be Gene Tierney-Belle’s Confederate guerillia husband, so Scott moved up and his role taken by Dana Andrews.
Gary Cooper, Sergeant York, 1941. On the reserve list (with Jimmy Stewart, bien sur) when Warners announced Coop as thewar hero of 1918 – without a finished script, much less a director. After Fleming, Hathaway, Koster, Taurog, Vidor and Wyler passed, Howard Hawks proved quite satisfied with Coop.
John Sutton, A Yank in the RAF, 1940. One of the Hollywood films preparing Americans for entering WWII, with, therefore, a happy ending patched on instead of Tyrone Power’s heroic death because “audiences would resent his dying… and not getting the girl.”(!) The UK government agreed, not wishing to show US audiences how Americans helping the UK could die. Actually, head Fox Darryl Zanuck (who wrote this story) had already decreed that Fox films would always have happy ends following the public anger over Power’s death in Blood and Sand, 1940.
Robert Cummings, Saboteur, 1941. Cooper versus Fonda, round two… For what proved his second flop at Universal second, Alfred Hitchcock wanted Fonda, Cooper or Joel McCrea as his hero. Cummings was a disaster. Hitch made sure he had total charge of his work in future. He actually used Cummings again in Dial M For Murder, 1953. And, finally, Fonda as The Wrong Man in 1955.
George Montgomery, Accent on Love, 1940. Director Henry Lachman’s target for the “poor but pedigreed” Wyndham. Except, Ray McCarey actually helmed the Dalton Trumbo tale, pairing Montgomery with the Danish beauty, Osa Massen.
Robert Cummings, Kings Row, 1941. Fox tried to buy the scandalous book for Fonda. Warner won the battle. Rex Downing and Philip Reed, were also up for Parris, studying medicine under the doctor in “the town they talk of in whispers,” full of murder, sadism, depravity. And worse that had to be axed from Henry Bellamann’s 1940 novel: sex (premarital), sex (gay), incest, suicide… Peyton Place 16 years before Peyton Place!
Paul Muni, Hudson’s Bay, 1940. The birth of Canada, Hollywood style… A story about the Hudson Bay Company had been on head Fox Darryl Zanuck’s mind since 1936. He cancelled it in 1939 because “the feature would have a weak box-office pull at the present time.” His hero changed from Fonda, Don Ameche, Dean Jagger, Fred MacMurray, Tyrone Power to Muni – his first gig since quitting Warner Bros.
George Montgomery, Ten Gentlemen From West Point, 1941. West Point – The Early Years. (Far from historically accurate). Fonda, Tyrone Power and Randolph Scott were the early birds for the principled Kentuckian frontiersman – highly smitten with Maureen O’Hara
Walter Brennan, Swamp Water, 1941. Inevitably, Fonda and Jean Gabin, were also in the loop for the fugitive in Jean Renoir’s first US film since fleeing his Nazi-occupied France. (Fonda would later re-make Gabin and Renoir’s 1939 classic Le jour se leve as The Long Night in 1946). As usual, Hollywood had scant respect for anyone who was better than Hollywood. Head Fox Darryl F Zanuck dared complain that the master réalisateur of La Grande Illusion, La bête humaine La règle du jeu – revered as the greatest film-maker by Chaplin and Welles – was too slow!! Renoir was fired, then asked to stay. Soon as the film was finished, Renoir quit Fox. “He’s not one of us,” said DFZ. Dissolve. On the Oscar night of April 8, 1975, he received an honorary Academy Award for his career. One of his stars, Ingrid Bergman, picked it up for him. I know because I was there.
John Sutherland, Bambi, 1942. Walt Disney did not start using celebrity voices for his toons until the last film he supervised: The Jungle Book, 1966. But had the idea much earlier… Even so, ’tis hard to imagine Hank as a white-tailed deer ! but he was in the mix for the final voice – the young adult Bambi – after the baby, young and adolescent versions) in the classic Disney toon.
Gary Cooper, For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1942. Ousted in excellent company… Robert Donat, Clark Gable, Sterling Hayden, Joel McCrea, Ray Milland, Tyrone Power. Because Ernest Hemingway insisted on Coop (and Ingrid Bergman). He’d had them in mind when writing the book.
Alexander Knox, Wilson, 1943. Hank and Coop were considered for the White House, but the Canadian Knox was finally elected as 28th US President Woodrow Wilson. (Just no mention of him supporting the Ku Klax Klan). The result was such a major flop that its loving producer Darryl F Zanuck banned everyone talking to to him about his paean to the “pre-FDR.” Cooper never was a POTUS, real or false, in his 119 movies; while Fonda played three, Young Mr Lincoln in 1938, and two fictionals in Fail Safe, 1963, and Meteor, 1979.
Gregory Peck, The Keys of the Kingdom, 1944. Gone With The Wind producer David O Selznick gave up after two years and sold out to Fox when he couldn’t find the perfect (all too perfect) hero, Father Francis Chisholm. Contenders included Fonda, Dana Andrews, Joseph Cotten, Maurice Evans, Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Dean Jagger, Gene Kelly, Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, Spencer Tracy, Orson Welles… plus the most unlikely Catholic missionaries of all: Alan Ladd and Edward G Robinson! Auteur Joseph L Mankiewicz signed Peck in July 1943 for his second film – and first Oscar nomination.
James Stewart, It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946.
James Stewart, Call Northside 777, 1947. Hank said: No thanks. Jim, his pal said: Yes, please. To being the crusading Chicago Times reporter trying to free an possibly innocent man from jail for killing a cop. Fonda went on to play such a victim, himself, in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man in 1955.
Lamberto Maggiorani, Ladri di biciclette (UK/US: Bicycle Thieves), Italy, 1948. When legendary producer David O Selznick oafishly suggested Cary Grant for the down on his luck Italian father looking for a job, director Vittorio De Sica (wisely) preferred Fonda. Then, Selznick quit and De Sica made the timeless, neorealism classic his way. With amateurs.
Dan Dailey, Chicken Every Sunday, 1948. Cast changed completely as the comedy moved from Warner to Fox. Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Hara, Jeanne Crain, John Payne became Dan Dailey, Celeste Holm, Colleen Townsend and Alan Young. York Times critic Bosley Crowther said the movie‘s menu was good, substantial cooking in the Hollywood sentimental style, larded with wholesome portions of Ma-Loves-Pa, seasoned with generous sprinklings of standard bucolic farce.
Robert Ryan, Born To Be Bad, 1950. RKO tried to make Anne Parrish’s novel twice before. With Fonda, Joan Fontaine and John Sutton in 1946 and again with Barbara Bel Geddes two years later (as Bed of Roses) when the RKO boss Howard Hughes was not sufficiently aroused by Bel Geddes. “Too plain.”
Willliam Lundigan, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain, 1950. The Methodist minister and his genteel bride dispatched to serve Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains area, circa 1910, went from Fonda and Jeanne Crain to Lundigan and Susan Hayward. Amen.
José Ferrer, Miss Sadie Thompson, 1951. He found it easy to refuse Davidson, no longer a clergyman in the santized (and 3D) version of W Somerset Maugham’s Rain.
Gary Cooper, High Noon, 1951. Sidney Lumet called it ”a romantic version of real life.” Scenarist Carl Forman created Marshal Will Kane for Henry Fonda – passed over by the suits on being grey-listed for his politics. “Not for me,” said Lancaster, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Charlton Heston, John Wayne. Gregory Peck found it too similar to his previous Gunfighter(!). And Kirk Douglas came thisclose to being Sheriff Will Kane with Lola Albright as the missus. Cooper was keener. He even cut his fee to wear the tin star – and win the Oscar on March 19, 1953. And a life-long friendship with the ex-black-listed Forman, who fled to London and… The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Key, The Guns of Navarone, The Victors, Mackenna’s Gold, Young Winston.
William Holden, Executive Suite, 1953. When handed the pet project of MGM production chief Dore Schary, producer John Houseman tried hard – but lost Fonda to a Broadway-boundd musical that, well, never arrived. The film had no music just the city sounds of New York. “Church bells, sirens, the roar of traffic, crowd noises, horns, the squeal of tires, faraway screams of brakes,” ordered Schary. “It all worked far better than conventional music.”
John Wayne, The High and the Mighty, 1953. Producer John Wayne tried Fonda, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy for the veteran pilot and then said: “Aw hell, I’ll do it myself.” Superbly. A calm pro playing a calm pro – and cutting five of his close-ups in the editing. Everyone else, especially Jan Sterling and Claire Trevor were working for Oscars. Didn’t get ’em.
James Mason, A Star Is Born, 1954.
Rock Hudson, Giant, 1955.
Rock Hudson, Written on the Wind, 1956. Due in a 1949 version with sisters Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine.
Kerwin Matthews, The Garment Jungle, 1956. “I was the hardest working unknown actor in the world, ” Matthews often boasted. However, “handsome is as handsome does” does not an actor make. He was rarely up to his roles, more acceptable in (Ray Harryhausen) fantasies than this toughly realistic trades union battleground.
Dean Martin, Rio Bravo, 1958.
Robert Mitchum, The Wonderful Country, 1959. Director Robert Parrish could not interest Fonda or (the just wed) Gregory Peck. Mitchum leapt and his lawyer made it a Mitchum (DRM) production.
Alain Cuny, La dolce vita, Italy/France, 1959. Italian genius Federico Fellini always planned on having Fonda as the grave, intellectual Steiner during the March 16-August 27 schedule. With more support from… Greer Garson, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Ustinov. Even after he re-wrote it to assuage her initial anger, Fellini scrapped Luise Rainer’s role of the lonely old nympho, Dolores. Fellini then considered the French Cuny and Italy’s Enrico Maria Salernio. Fellow Italian director Pier Palo Pasolini advised Fellini to take Cuny.
James Stewart, Two Rode Together, 1960. Producer Stanley Shpetner’s suggestions for Marshal Guthrie McCabe were impossible. Henry Fonda and John Ford had fallen out during Mister Roberts – and John Wayne was booked up. Ford settled for “two deaf hairpieces!” – James Stewart, Richard Widmark – for a diluted version of his 1955classic, The Searchers. He called this version was. “the worst piece of crap I’ve made in 20 years.” .“Ford would have cast me,” said Fonda, “if we’d still been talking but we weren’t, so he didn’t. He once told me: ‘Who the hell needs you when I’ve got Jimmy Stewart.’ I thought that was mean, not just to me, but to Jim.”
Karl Malden, One Eyed Jacks, 1961. A first time director called Marlon Brando showed his first cut – 200 minutes – to his Julius Caesar director Joseph L Mankiewicz and Stanley Kubrick. They both told him:. “Cut the Chinese girl and you;ll have a wonderful picture.” Seven years before Italian director Sergio Leone managed it for Once Upon A Time in the West, Marlon Brando toyed with the notion of Hank Fonda as a villain in what became Marlon’s directing debut. Stanley Kubrick quit making the film because he’d wanted Tracy. Fonda had been among the lovers of Brando’s mother – and this abusive sheriff character was called… Dad.
Clint Eastwood, Per un pugno di dollari/For A Fistful of Dollars, Italy-Germany-Spain, 1964 I
Arthur Kennedy, Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, 1962. Fonda was contacted before Kennedy when Gary Cooper died soon after being set to be the doctor father of Nick Adams (ie Hemingway). Then, while the film was on location in Italy, news arrived from Ketchum, Idaho, about Hemingway’s suicide – as hereditary as the bipolar disorder which also led to the suicides of his father, brother, sister and granddaughter, Margaux Hemingway.
Lee Van Cleef, Per qualche dollario in piu/For A Few Dollars More, Italy-Germany-Spain, 1966.
Joseph Cotton, The Oscar, 1966. Before coming good with The Graduate, The Lion in Winter, etc, New York producer Joseph E Levine had an unhealthy interest in snitty/snotty movies about Hollywood. The Carpetbaggers, Harlow and now the worst. He wanted Fonda as studio boss Kenneth H Regan. He did not get him. Just a drubbing from New York Times critic Bosley Crowther::“another distressing example of Hollywood fouling its nest – professionally, socially, commercially and especially artistically.” After the worse,. Fonda was also up for the year’s best…
Lee Van Cleef, Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Italy-Spain, 1966. Sergio Leone never gave up. Fonda’s price never went down. Even though the role was named Angel Eyes after Fonda’s blue orbs – finally Leoneised in Sergio’s spaghetti epic, C’era una volta il west/Once Upon A Time In the West, 1968.
Richard Burton, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966.

“The only part I wanted and didn’t get to do…” Elegant Fred Zinnemann was ready to helm Fonda and Bette Davis, when she had another run-in with Jack Warner. Edward Albee had penned his play for Fonda but his new agent, John Foreman, threw it out. “This no-balls character is not for my Henry.” Said his Henry: “They [the agency] turned it down without even telling me. To make up for this, CMA got me a picture called Spencer’s Mountain – it set the movie business back 20 years.” As for Burton? “I didn’t think Richard right for the part. Difficult for him to be vulnerable.”Thinking of their image, most actors were scared of being the emasculated husband of a blowsy, loudmouthed Elizabeth Taylor. Ernest Lehman was the producer and scenarist – well, the Burtons put all of playwright Edward Albee’s lines back into the script, leaving just two by Lehman!. He wanted Peter O’Toole as George. (The wife was Martha!). Liz liked Broadway’s George, Arthur Hill, but Jack Lemmon actually accepted the role – and changed his mind next day. (A matter, said insiders, more of money than fear). Cary Grant, James Mason and, amazingly, Glenn Ford, were also in the frame before Liz simply said: “What about Burton?” Just like she’d said about directors: “You know who’s a genius? Mike Nichols.” That’s how Broadway’s king started his amazing film-directing career – after studying the George Stevens classic, A Place in the Sun 20 times or more. “Everything you need to know about movies is in that film.” The star was… Liz Taylor. (Nichols was George opposite hs comedy partner, Elaine May, on stage in 1980).
Robert Ryan, The Wild Bunch, 1968.
George C Scott, Petulia, 1967. “She is this creature and I think Bob liked creatures,” said scripter Barbara Turner of director Robert Altman. “He was really good with women. He really liked women, I mean really liked them.” (Oh really! When I asked him during a London interview for news – if any – of Susanne Benton, from his That Cold Day in the Park, 1968, he said: Who?) Fonda signed on, everything was about to start when Warner pulled away. “They were worried abut Bob – somone they can’t control,” said Raymond Wagner, Altman’s business partner and producer. Altman shrugged and moved on to O Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-sting-a-ling – with Cary Grant !! That fell apart, as well.
Sean Connery, Shalako, 1968. “Mr. Lloyd, it’s not a very good script is it?” said Hank to UK producer Euan Lloyd over lunch at the star’s New York home. “But I’ll do any film that Eddie Dmytryk wants to direct. But you won’t find me acceptable in Hollywood. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll understand.” No star in the world ever said that to Lloyd, before or after. Sure enough, every Hollywood studio head said: Fonda’s finished! Author Louis L’Amour had seen the latest Bond film and said Sean would look good in the saddle. “Took me six months to get him,” said Lloyd. “He was very angry with everybody in life, wasn’t sure what he wanted to do.” Lloyd went back to his pre-sales customers – “now it’s going to cost three times more [$6m]” – and back to Fonda, “with my head between my legs. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve no commitment. Good luck with the film!’ I don’t know of any other star in the world who would do that. He was exceptional.” So was Lloyd’s final casting coup. Connery, who had quit 007, and Brigitte Bardot, who’d refused to be a Bond girl without him. Only one item was missing. Chemistry!
Warren Oates, The Hired Hand, 1971. Fretting about his memory, Hank paid his son Peter $2.50 an hour to run lines with him. “After about the fourth or fifth session, I realised he could memorise the phone book.” Even so, he passed on the project. Peter also directed and Hank thought the result “a little classic, a beautiful, beautiful film.”
Ralph Waite, The Waltons, TV,1971-1981. First triumph of the new Lorimar combine started as a Yuletide special – The Homecoming: A Christmas Story – set in rural Virginia during the Depression. It did well on CBS and Lorimar suggested a series. “Way too soft,” said CBS icon Fred Silverman, “it’ll never get a number, [Pause].But if you can get Henry Fonda to play the father, maybe.”Then another CBS legend, Bill Paley, said: “We’ve taken a lot out of this business – let’s put something back in.” And it ran for ten years.
James Coburn, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, 1972.
Burt Reynolds, Deliverance, 1971. “The studio “had very little confidence in the material,” said UK director Boorman. He wanted Brando and Lee Marvin as Lewis and Ed. “We’re too old,” said Lee. But not as aged as another notion: Fonda and James Stewart! The shoot would have killed them – along the mighty dangerous Chattooga River in Burt’s home state of Georgia … doubling for author James Dickey’s Cahulawassee River. When the idea of Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson represented half the $2m budget, the Warner suits looked at Charlton Heston, George C Scott, Donald Sutherland and told Boorman: “Make it with nobodies for no money.”
Vincent Gardenia, Death Wish, 1973. Sidney Lumet was the original director – and he lined up Jack Lemmon as the New York architect turned revenge killer Paul Kersey and Fonda (a Lumet regular) as the police detective hunting the vigilante doing the NYPD’s job. When Lumet switched to Serpico, his stars ran. Anyway, “it’s too violent” – said the killer from Once Upon A Time In America!
John Wayne, Rooster Cogburn, 1974. The idea was fair – a sequel to True Grit. But if Wayne proved too ill, what would be the point of someone else in his titular Oscar-winning rôle? Marlon Brando topped producer Hal Wallis’ eye-patch list of Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, George C Scott and some of Duke’s old co-stars: Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck. Plus four of co-star Katharine Hepburn’s previous partners – Charles Bronson, Burt Lancaster, Peter O’Toole, Anthony Quinn – and as she continued trying to pick guys she’d never worked with before… Warren Beatty, Henry Fonda, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Paul Scofield, Henry Winkler (!)… (McQueen turned down her Grace Quigley in 1983). Kate wrote that embracing Duke “was like leaning against a great tree.”
Peter Finch, Network, 1976.
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore…” Both director Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Chayefsky came from the golden age of US TV – and pulled no punches in detailing where the medium was going (down the drain. Indeed, their fictional USB fourth network became, well, Fox. After tenuous thoughts about real TV News anchors (John Chancellor and the venerable Walter Cronkite),Paddy had a wish list of real actors for the unhinged news anchor Howard Beale: the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.” Henry Fonda found it “too hysterical” (his daughter Jane… was up for Faye Dunaway’s Oscar-winning role), Glenn Ford, Cary Grant, Gene Hackman, William Holden (he played news exec Max Schumacher, instead), Walter Matthau, Paul Newman, James Stewart (appalled by the script’s bad language!). Plus George C Scott , who refused because he had once been “offended” by Lumet! (Yet his final film was Lumet’s final film, Gloria, 1998). Lumet had just the one name – and this proved to be Finchy’s farewell, winning the first posthumous Best Actor Oscar. Lumet was with Peter when he died. They were in the Beverly Hills Hotel, awaiting a joint interview, when Finch collapsed and died soon after in hospital, never regaining consciousness from his heart attack. His performance won the first posthumous acting Oscar. (Ironically, the second was also for an Aussie, Heath Ledger, for The Dark Knight… 33 years later).
Edward Fox, Soldaat van Oranje (Soldier of Orange), Holland-Belgium, 1977. Dutch director Paul Verhoeven needed a British officer for his true WWII tale. Alec Guinness and David Niven stepped away. But hey, Henry Fonda is in Italy… why noitan American colonel? Fonda could have written this 1997 comment by the New York Times critic Janet Maslin. “The film’s two main English characters, an officer (Edward Fox) and his trampy, ridiculous assistant (Susan Penhaligon), are so weirdly caricatured that they may make a great comic impression on American viewers.”
Burt Lancaster, Atlantic City, 1979. Among Paris auteur Louis Malle’s choices (James Mason, Robert Mitchum, Laurence Olivier,James Stewart) for the aging numbers runner (“a cellmate of Bugsy Siegel”) involved with Susan Sarandon as an oyster-bar waitress and an ex-Betty Grable lookalike. Made after the chagrin of losing his 20-year-old dream project, Victory, Malle’s little gem won five Oscar nominations in 1982. The bookies expected Burt to collect his second Academy Award except Jane Fonda had been, drumming up support for her On Golden Pond co-star. And he won. Fella named Henry Fonda.
EG Marshall, Superman II, 1980.
Paul Newman, Harry & Son, 1983. LA lawyer Ronald Buck tried to interest Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Jason Robards, even Telly Savalas in his script about a widowed, blue collar father and his ”bookish, sensistive” son. They all passed. Buck gave a script to Joanne Woodward to interest her (oh, yeah, sure!) in the lady highly smitten by Harry. She showed it to hubby and he called Buck: “Can I direct?” It was another two years before Newman (who lost his own son, Scott, at age 28, in 1978) had the rewrite) he wanted. But the studios didn’t care… “That pissed me off and I find I work very well when Im pissed off. So I finally agreed to act in it” – although having sworn off the double chore since Sometimes A Great Notion, when he said acting and directing simultaneously was like putting a gun in his mouth.
Rebecca DeMornay, The Runaway Train, 1984. Due in 1970 as Akira Kurosawa’s first US film, the project was canceled due to heavy snowstorms (and budget hassles) in the upstate New York. Cannon’s much ridiculed Go-Go Boys, Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, wisely invited Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky aboard – and really shook up the 1986 Cannes festival. Kurosawa had wanted Fonda as the railwayman aboard a fast moving train without a driver – and Peter Falk as an escaped convict. In the other AK’s version, the railwayman was an unrecognisable De Mornay substituting Karen Allen.
Sean Connery, The Presido, 1988. Lee Marvin and Jeff Bridges as two cops with a history became Sean Connery and Don Johnson (Miami Vice got in the way) and wound up as Connery and Harmon… (Marvin fell ill and died that year).So just three choices for the Army cop but a surprising 18 for the second banana rôle of the detective (including rival biceps Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone) in what Chicago critic Roger Ebert called “a clone, of a film assembled out of spare parts from… the cinematic junkyard.”
Robert Urich, Lonesome Dove, TV, 1989. A script for director Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 dream of getting John Wayne, James Stewart and Hank together in one last Western as Woodrow Call, Gus McCrae, Jake Spoon – led to Larry McMurtry’s supreme novel, the Pulitzer Prize, seven-Emmy award-winning mini-series, one sequel and two prequels. Duke and the guys were warned off by a jealous John Ford.
Anthony Hopkins, Meet Joe Black, 1997. Like Hopkins, Hackman would have suffered in the indignity of his rôle being slashed to ribbons for the TV – and airlines! – version of the three-hour account of the media mogul meeting Death (Brad Pitt).

Birth year: 1905Death year: 1982Other name: Casting Calls: 55