Audie Murphy

Posted on by Tony CrawleyCategories:Actors

  1. John Wayne, Jet Pilot, 1949.  Basically, Howard Hughes was re-making his cherished Hell’s Angels, 1927, with modern jet fighters. Only he spent  so long tinkering around with the result that  the actual planes were obsolete  by the time it opened in…  1957!    Said John Wayne, who replaced Audie Murphy who replaced Cary Grant as Colonel Jim Shannon: “The final budget was something like $4million. Just too stupid for words”  – and  wasone of the worst movies he’d ever made.  The next worst was The Conqueror, 1955.  Also for Hughes.

  2. William Campbell, Man Without A Star, 1954.      Change of Jeff Jimson.  No one noticed –  as Kirk Douglas was eating up the screen. As per usual.

  3. John Carroll, Plunderers of Painted Flats, 1958.       The ex-Gun in the Dust was first bought two years earlier by producer Robert Jacks for Murphy to play gunfighter Clint Jones. Today, it is known only as the final nail in the coffin of 1935’s Republic Pictures  – due to too many TVesterns.

  4. Robert Mitchum, Thunder Road, 1958.      Case of The Boss preferring to star in his own production (and story), just as John Wayne had done in taking Blood Alley from Mitchum in 1955. Took guts as the WWII hero Murphy, suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, had a hair-trigger temper, was acquitted of attempted murder charges, scared cast and crew of  The Gun Runners, 1958, by carrying a pistol on-set. Less dangerously, he bred thoroughbred horses on several ranches and wrote hit songs for Eddy Arnold, Dean Martin and Charley Pride. .

  5. Skip Homeier, Plunders of Painted Flats, 1958.     Three years earlier, independent producer Robert Jacks was having the script tailored for Murphy.
  6. Andrew Robinson, Dirty Harry, 1971.

  7. Andrew Garfield, Hacksasw Ridge, 2015.   Mel Gibson directed one helluva good WWII movie  about the heroic conscientious objector Desmond T Doss (nicknamed The Preacher), Far better, one supposes, than producer Hal B Walls would have achieved in  the 50s – to star another WWII hero, the   most decorated combat soldier of the war : 33 awards including (like Doss)  the Medal of Honor, America’s  highest award for bravery . Murphy said playing himself in To Hell and Back was more than enough. He was quite content to act in sagebrushers. 

 

 

 Birth year: 1924Death year: 1971Other name: Casting Calls:  7