- Dennis O’Keefe, The Story of Dr Wassell, 1943. When first choices Alan Ladd and Robert Preston joined the real WWII… Sullivan, Dana Andrews, Alan Baxter, James Brown, Michael O’Shea, Walter Reed, Richard Whorf were also seen for Hoppy Hopkins. the wounded sailor inspired to live by the love of Carol Thurston’s native nurse, Tremartini, inevitably nicknamed Three Martini. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it “hoopla warfare in a Technicolor blaze… True, such a thing did happen. But not this way, we’ll bet a hat!”
- Joseph Cotten, Love Letters, 1945. Power play! Producer Hal Wallis set his new signing from MGM, Ann Richards, opposite Sullivan. Producer David Selznick pulled strings for his lover, Jennifer Jones – and for her favourite partner, Cotten.
- Dick Powell, The Bad and The Beautiful, 1952. With new-found TV fame, Powell pulled rank and swopped roles, choosing to play the scenarist and making Sullivan the film-maker in director Vincente Minnelli’s Hollywierd drama.
- Keenan Wynn, Point Blank, 1967. Barry Sullivan and Austrian star Oskar Werner were up for Richard Stark’s tough guy. Just as Stark was one of US novelist Donald E Westlake’s 19 pseudonyms, his hero of 24 books, Parker, was Walker in this film – and indeed, Porter in Mel Gibson’s (weak) re-make, Payback, 1997. In one book, a character cannot remember Parker’s name and calls him “Porter, Walker, Archer, something like that.” Steven Soderbergh is the film’s greatest fan – “a film that I’ve stolen from so many times.” In his book. Cinema Speculations, Quentin Tarantino commented that despite being such a tough customer, Parker is “remarkably well represented in movies – thereps beejn as many Parkers as there’s been Phlilip Marlowes.”-treferrt8ing to Gibson, Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, even Anna Karina (in Jean-Luc Godard’s take on Stark’s The Jugger, as Made in USA, 1966).
Birth year: 1912Death year: 1994Other name: Casting Calls: 0