Book Review: 'Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan: Hollywood's All-Time Worst Casting Blunders'

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 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, Bona makes the reader laugh out loud while at the same time wondering what some of those casting directors were indeed, thinking...or smoking.