- Rory Harrity, Where The Boys Are, 1959. Producer Joe Pasternak was reported as selecting unknowns (Flynn, Burt Reynolds, etc) to battle the power of big Hollywood stars. Total bull! The top roles were for jeanagers, few of which were powerful A Stars. It was just simple econmics: unknowns were cheap. Errol Flynn’s hadnsome son made eleven movies before becoming a war photographer-correspondent for Paris-Match, Time-Life, UPI. While covering the Vietnam, conflict, he went missing in Cambodia, presumably taken prisoner and executed by his Khmer Rouge captors. He was never heard of after April 6, 1970 and declared legally dead in 1984.
- Frederick Stafford, Furia à Bahia pour OSS 117 (US: OSS 117: Mission For A Killer), France-Italy, 1965. Kerwin Matthews had become too expensive for French pockets after two OSS 117 films about Jean Bruce’s secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath. Réaisiateur André Hunebelle (surprisingly old at 68 for modern spy romps) looked over other Americans moonlighting in Europe – Lex Barker, Ken Clark, Richard Harrison, George Nader – and chose the wooden Frederick Stafford when Ray Danton was a better actor and Flynn better looking. Certainly, the Czech-born Stafford was the only OSS 117 to work for Hitchcock – proving just as wooden in Topaze, 1969. And to think, Hitch once thought John Gavin wooden in Psycho.
Birth year: 1941Death year: 1971Other name: Casting Calls: 2