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Let me get one thing clear up front: Gordon Scott was never a great
actor, he was a bodybuilder first and foremost, and it can't be denied
that he got most of his acting jobs thanks to his impressive physique.
Still, having said that, he had a certain acting talent that made his
career last for a whole 12 years. Not much, you might say, but in Gordon
Scott's time, this was almost incredibly long for a bodybuilder. And
while Scott may not have been much of an actor, his career followed the
typical trail of an American B-actor: he started out as the star of a
movie series, later he tried to translate his success on the big screen
into a TV-series (unsuccessfully in Scott's case), and when his career in
American movies was done for, he moved to Europe - Italy to be exact - for
career recovery, where he was welcomed with open arms and was a
smashing success ...
until Italian genre cinema too took a turn into a direction where
clean-cut heroes like him were no longer needed ... But let's
start at the beginning: Gordon Scott was born Gordon M. Werschkul in
Portland, Oregon in 1927. Even in his youth, Gordon's father educated him
and his brothers in physical fitness, so it should come as no surprise
that Gordon eventually took up studying physical education at the
university of Oregon - albeit only for one term, then he joined the
US-army. Before he was discharged in 1947, he had served as both a
drill-instructor and an MP. After his discharge, Scott took a variety of
civilian jobs like cowboy, fireman, farm machinery salesman and finally
lifeguard. During all the time he steadily worked out so he soon had the
body of a bodybuilder. Rumour has it that Gordon Scott was
discovered by a couple of talent scouts in 1953, when he was working as a
lifeguard, and his perfectly shaped body and especially his 19-inch biceps
rather naturally made him a perfect choice for Tarzan, a role
in which he
would have plenty of opportunity to run around shirtless and show off his
arms and chest. Plus, his clean-cut features made him perfect for heroic roles
like the King of the Jungle. Fact is, Tarzan
producer Sol Lesser had just parted ways with his
then-current Tarzan
Lex Barker [Lex Barker
bio - click here] and was
looking for a replacement - and ultimately, Gordon Scott was chosen from a
group of 200 applicants to do the job.
Scott's first appearance
as Tarzan
was in Tarzan's Hidden Jungle
(1955, Harold D.Schuster), which
was pretty much a routine Tarzan-film with no big surprises. In all, Sol
Lesser's Tarzan films - especially those for RKO
- were no film classics compared to the initial Johnny
Weissmuller-Tarzans Tarzan the Ape Man
(1932, W.S.Van Dyke) and Tarzan and his
Mate (1934, Cedric Gibbons, Jack Conway) [Johnny
Weissmuller-bio - click here], these
films were just formula movies, and when Scott took over from Lex Barker,
the formula had pretty much worn out and the film is just a tired, almost
sub-standard jungle adventure. More interesting than the actual
film might be the fact that Scott got to know, fell in love with and
married his co-star Vera Miles (who plays Tarzan's love interest - not
Jane - in the film) during filming it, a marriage that lasted until 1959.
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Ultimately,
Tarzan's Hidden Jungle would be the last Tarzan
film to be shot in black
and white (well, sort of anyways) and the last Sol Lesser produced for RKO. For his subsequent two
Tarzan
films - Tarzan and the Lost Safari
(1957, H.Bruce Humberstone) and Tarzan's Fight for Life (1958, H.Bruce
Humberstone), Sol Lesser hooked up with MGM (which also produced the first
6 Weissmuller
Tarzans) and would be able to shoot in colour - and actually,
these films were a big improvement over their predecessors, especially Tarzan and the Lost Safari,
which was partially shot in Africa. They might not have been great movies as such, but they were
more solid than anything RKO
put out in a long time (speaking only of Tarzan-films,
of course).
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Eventually, Sol Lesser decided to take
the series from the big to the small screen, took the leads of Tarzan's Fight for Life
- Gordon Scott as Tarzan, Eve Brent as Jane and Rickie
Sorensen as their son - and had them do a couple of pilots for a projected
TV-series. Somehow though the series never took off the ground, and
eventually the pilots were re-edited into a feature film called Tarzan and
the Trappers (1958, Charles F.Haas, Sandy Howard) and sold to Europe. In
the USA the film did not premiere until 10 years later - and then of all
places on television ! After the TV-pilots, Sol Lesser
not only left the Tarzan-franchise (after 25 years of involvement and no
less than 5 different Tarzans) but the film industry altogether - at the
tender age of 68. Surprisingly though, that didn't mean the end of
Gordon Scott's career as Tarzan, he stayed with the character for two more
films for Paramount -
Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959, John Guillermin) -
featuring a
young, pre-James Bond Sean Connery as a villain - and Tarzan the Magnificent (1960, Robert
Day) - with Jock Mahoney and John Carradine [John
Carradine bio - click here] as bad guys. These films looked a slice
better than the typical Lesser-productions, they benefited from higher
budgets and featured a certain freshness that had long been absent from
the Lesser-films, but overall they too were far from the series' former
greatness. Eventually though, Scott's career as the Lord
of the Jungle came to an end - interestingly Jock Mahoney, who plays the
villain in Tarzan the Magnificent, would take over the Tarzan-role in
1962's Tarzan Goes to India (John Guillermin) - and Gordon Scott had to
find out that for a man of his built and with his credentials it wasn't
all that easy to land a decent job, at least not in Hollywood. Hollywood these days was
experiencing some major changes (and has been doing so for the
last 10 years and would for at least 10 more) since B-movie production like in the 1940's (when actors
like Gordon Scott would have been in high demand) had broken down and
television had pretty much taken over, with most established Hollywood studios
desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to find their direction. So
Gordon Scott did what many actors in a similar situation - including Lex
Barker, Richard Harrison [Richard Harrison bio - click
here!], and even Clint Eastwood - did as well: He went to Italy for career recovery. In Italy,
the situation was quite different from that in the USA, here TV didn't
have such a strong foothold yet and thus the film
industry was booming. The Italians were cranking out genre pictures by the
dozen and they would always welcome American actors to take the
lead in their films for international appeal - which was good news for
Gordon Scott . Plus back in the early sixties, the production of sword and sandal epics
(the so-called peplums) was booming in Italy following the success of
films like Le
Fatiche di Ercole (1958, Pietro Francisci) starring Steve Reeves -
and all
these films had one thing in common: They starred at least one bodybuilder
(like for the Tarzan-films,
running through the scenery shirtless looking good was one of the main
requirements for peplum actors). Now there was a bill that Gordon Scott could easily fit, he was a
moviestar from America, he was a bodybuilder, plus he had the necessary
clean-cut heroic features to be convincomg as a larger-than-life hero. True, he wasn't the greatest actor, but compared to the many
musclemen who came after him, he didn't fare too bad either.
Scott's
first peplum was Romolo e Remo/Duel of the Titans (1961,
Sergio Corbucci), an adaptation of the myth of the foundation of Rome in
which Gordon Scott plays Remus opposite Steve Reeves' Romulus - allegedly
Reeves was supposed to play both roles but declined and instead suggested
his personal friend Gordon Scott for the role of Remus [Steve
Reeves bio - click here]. The film was one of the
more serious peplums of its time inasmuch as it didn't have a superhuman
muscleman thrown into some fantasy world saving whatever (and whoever)
there is to save, instead it stayed as close as the genre allowed to its
source. Nowadays, the film is considered one of the best (if most
underappreciated) peplums of the 1960's. It should also be noted that
while Steve Reeves as Romulus is the actual hero of the film, Scott as
Romulus' brother Remus who eventually turns evil has the meatier role -
and he isn't at all bad as the baddie ... However, from Remus of
the myth, Gordon Scott took a step down for the next character he
portrayed: the neo-mythological superhero Maciste. Maciste
was maybe the archetypical muscleman character of Italian cinema history:
He was created in 1914 as a supporting character of the silent film
Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone), but the character (and Bartalomeo Pagano, the
actor who played him) proved to be so successful that he was given his own
series that lasted until 1927. In the 1960's, when after the success of
the Hercules-series
muscleman-epics were on the rise again, someone dusted off the old
character and before the decade was half over, a few dozen Maciste-films
were made. (Interestingly enough, in the English language versions of his
films, Maciste
hardly ever goes by his own name but is rechristened Goliath,
Samson, Son of Hercules or even Hercules.) The interesting thing about Maciste-films
(as opposed to the Hercules-series)
was that while Hercules
was firmly rooted in Greek mythology, Maciste moved around in time and space with the greatest of ease, his
adventures spanning the centuries and taking place in Europe, Asia, Africa
and South America alike - which however did not necessarily mean that the
films weren't all following pretty much the same formula ...
Gordon
Scott played Maciste
in two movies, both made in 1961, and while Maciste alla Corte del Gran
Khan/Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World/Goliath and
the Golden City (Riccardo Freda) took our muscleman hero to China
(mainly because the production company Panda Film wanted to make
good use of the sets left over from the bigger budget film Marco Polo
[1961, Piero Pierotti]) but was otherwise pretty routine stuff, Maciste
contro il Vampiro/Goliath and the Vampires (1961, Giacomo
Gentilomo) really went over the top when Maciste was pitted against
vampires. As could be expected, this blend of horror and sword-and-sandal
movie was a piece of trash and could hardly be taken seriously - but for
the open-minded and young-at-heart it provided great entertainment as well
...
Over the next 3 years, many more peplums followed,
including Una Regina per Cesare/A Queen for Caesar (1962,
Piero Pierotti, Victor Tourjansky), a highly fictionalized film about
Cleopatra (Pascale Petit) in which Scott merely has a cameo as Julius
Caesar, a gladiator film called Il Gladiatore di Roma/Gladiator
of Rome (1962, Mario Costa), two appearances as muscleman Goliath, Goliath e
la Schiava Ribelle/Goliath
and the Rebel Slave/Arrow of the Avenger/The Tyrant of Lydia
against the Son of Hercules (1963, Mario Caiano) and L'Eroe di
Babilonia/Goliath, King of Slaves/The Beast of Babylon
against the Son of Hercules (1963, Siro Marcellini), Ercole
contro Molock/The
Conquest of Mycene/Hercules
against Moloch (1963, Giorgio Ferroni), a film in which despite
the title Scott does not play Hercules but a mere mortal who
has chosen the Hercules name as an alias, Il Colosso di Roma/Hero
of Rome and Coriolano: Eroe senza Patria/Coriolanus, Hero
without a Country/Thunder of Battle (both 1964, Giorgio
Ferroni).
In 1965, American producers Albert Band and Joseph
E.Levine (both of whom had been involved with peplums before) had the idea
of producing a Hercules-television
series based on the tried and true peplum formula and even involving some talent from Italy. And they chose Gordon Scott - who despite his many
appearances in muscleman-epics had never played Hercules
before - to play the lead. Unfortunately though - just like the proposed Tarzan-series
starring Gordon Scott before it - the Hercules-television
series never got past its pilot, Hercules and the Prisoner of Troy/Hercules
vs the Sea Monster (1965, Albert Band). The reason for the
pilot to fail might be that by the mid-1960's the market was so (over-)saturated with peplums that even the Italians stopped producing them, and
the slightly older (and better) peplums could even be seen on TV by then and were often
more exciting than Hercules and the Prisoner of Troy, so why bother
watching the TV-series ? As mentioned above, peplum-production
died down in the mid-1960's, and for quite a number of reasons actually: First
and foremost, the market was totally over-saturated, which led audiences
craving for something else, plus the peplums released in the mid-60's were
often done so cheaply they failed to convince even the least disciminating
audience, the plots of the films grew more and more repetetive (and more
and more stupid), the bodybuilders Italian producers discovered all
over the place to play the leads in these films got worse and worse when
it came to acting - and the shining, musclebound, often superhuman hero of
the peplums suddenly had to make way for another type of hero (and another
type of actor and film) who couldn't be more different: the cynical loner-antihero
of the Spaghetti Western - remember, Sergio Leone's Per
un Pugno di Dollari/A
Fistful of Dollars was made in 1964.
With the demise of
the peplum many bodybuilder actors vanished from the movie industry just
as quickly as they once appeared out of nowhere. Gordon Scott
fared a little better than his competition: Since he had some modest
acting talents, and a certain international reputation, he could/would
also be cast in roles that didn't require him to take his shirt off, and he
had proven so even while he primarily played in peplums: In Il Figlio
dello Sceicco/Son of the Sheik (1962, Mario Costa) he played
the title role, he starred in the pirate movie Il Leone di San Marco/The
Lion of St.Mark/The Marauder (1963, Luigi Capuano), he could be seen as Zorro
in Zorro e i Tre
Moschettieri/Zorro
and the Three Musketeers (1963, Luigi Capuano), and he played Buffalo
Bill in the film Buffalo Bill, l'Eroe del Far West/Buffalo
Bill, Hero of the Far West (1965, Mario Costa), a film that was closer
to traditional American B-Westerns than the more current Italian variety. In
1966, Scott would make what would be one of his most interesting films, Gli
Uomini dal Passo Pesante/The Tramplers (Albert Band, Mario
Sequi), a gritty Western/family drama that also stars Jim Mitchum and
Franco Nero and veteran actor Joseph Cotten, who basically steals the show
as embittered patriarch. In 1967, Gordon Scott had two more
appearances in James Bond-style espionage flicks, Il
Raggio Infernale/Nest of Spies/Danger! Death Ray
(Gianfranco Baldanello) and Secretissimo (Fernando Cerchio), two
cheaply made and insignificant but at times quite charming actioners - but
basically, he had to realize that at age 40, his career as action hero was
over, and consequently he retired from the movie industry for good to
follow his dreams elsewhere - though it's not quite clear what he did
after his film career has come to an end. In all, Gordon Scott may never
have been too great an actor, probably not even the best Tarzan,
and more often than not he was chosen for his roles due to his physique
rather than his talent ... but at the same time he played in many a fun
film a filmfan like me wouldn't want to miss for the world. Sure, none of them
was a classic, but then again, one can't watch classics all of the time ... Update
May 2007: It has just been reported that Gordon Scott died on April 30th
2007 from complications following heart surgery. Our condolences are with
his family.
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