A few weeks ago, I put up a post on different actors playing the same role and which was better. The post asked “who played that part better” and one of the movies on TCM today that I could have included, but didn’t, was Cape Fear. It didn’t come up in the comments either, surprisingly, but if you must know, I’d go with Robert Mitchum even though I love DeNiro’s rather hammed up performance. I think Mitchum had a better take on the character and DeNiro, being a great actor himself, recognized that and tried to go in a different direction so, not really his fault. But it raises another question in my mind, are certain roles simply made for certain actors? Certainly the role of Max Cady is, to my mind, tailor made for the style of Mitchum but I didn’t mind someone else giving it a crack. Is it different with other roles?
To go right to the title of this piece in search of our answer, could anyone have played Rhett Butler? We know several actors in Hollywood would have liked it and if someone like Errol Flynn could have done the accent right (psst, I don’t think he could have) it could have worked because he had the right adventurous flair needed for the character but he didn’t have the cynicism Gable flashed so effortlessly. Melvin Douglas could have played that cynicism but didn’t have the looks or adventurous flair. Robert Taylor simply didn’t have the charisma. And on down the line. I’m sure someone could have played Rhett Butler, and had Gable died pre-production, someone would have had to, but he didn’t so we’ll never know. And Gable didn’t even do an accent (though, psst again, I’m from Charleston, SC, and the Charleston accent actually sounds a lot like Gable).
So, who, in a pinch, would I have cast as Rhett Butler, had some tragic accident befell Mr. Gable? Well, Gary Cooper, it was said, was considered, but I never thought Cooper’s “aw shucks” style would have made a good fit at all with Rhett. No, in the end, I probably would have given Flynn a chance, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. In my mind, though, I’d always know Gable was the real Rhett.
What about other iconic roles? Could anyone besides Marlon Brando be Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront or Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire? Frank Sinatra wanted the role of Malloy in On the Waterfront but I hardly see how that could have worked (sorry, Frank). And plenty of actors have played Kowalski in stage and film adaptations of Streetcar without convincingly stealing any thunder whatsoever from Brando. But if both of those movies had been made ten years earlier, I’d go with John Garfield. In fact, for most “who but Brando could have played this,” I go with John Garfield. For the record, I’d go with John Garfield for a lot of roles and if ran the world, that man would have died with some Oscar gold on his mantle.
Okay, tougher question. All About Eve: Margo Channing and Addison Dewitt. The question: Is it humanly possible to cast those two roles better than they actually were? Answer: Um, no. But, if both Davis and Sanders had been abducted by UFOs the night before production began and the studio wouldn’t stop production, and you absolutely had to cast it, who would you go with? It’s tough, but not impossible. I think the easiest answer for me is Tallulah Bankhead and Clifton Webb. I don’t think either of those would give the same performances but they’d give good performances that would define the roles as their own. And that’s, I think, the point.
The purpose of a game like this for me is to imagine the roles differently, not try and pigeonhole another actor into the character created by someone else. And yet, that’s what I do. I think we all do it. I say things like I can’t imagine Sinatra working as Malloy but that’s because I know Brando in the role. Had it been Sinatra, first off, the character probably would have been a lightweight class boxer and maybe a little pushier. He would have made it work for him, which is all any actor can do. Even Gary Cooper would have done his best to make Rhett Butler work for him and if he succeeded, we would never think it possible for anyone else to take on the role. It’s why remakes often fail, because most of us refuse to accept a different interpretation of the characters. The story might have some changes in a remake but it’s usually who’s playing the roles that irks us more than plot changes. Many remakes are probably better than most of us give them credit for but we’re stuck on the original actors too much to notice. Usually because a great actor making a role their own is about the most powerful statement in all of cinema. Someone could do another version of Lawrence of Arabia tomorrow but I know no one can replace Peter O’Toole so even before production begins, the movie is operating at a disadvantage. How many other roles are there out there so well drawn by the actors who played them that we can’t imagine anyone else in the role? Probably too many to count but that shouldn’t stop us from trying. In doing so, we can begin to see the character in a whole new light.