Lancaster Billed First?
As a virtual unknown, how did Burt Lancaster get his name listed in the credits before both Edmund O'Brien and Ava Gardner?
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Musta had a great agent!
"We're fighting for this woman's honor, which is more than she ever did."
I believe that producer Mark Hellinger was impressed by Lancaster, had him under personal contract, was planning to make the young actor a star. Given that the movie was an adaptation of a Hemingway story, that director Robert Siodmak was pretty hot at the time, as was Hellinger for that matter, MGM must have felt that it was a good thing to let Ava Gardner go to Universal to make the film. She was already a star by then but I don't think that Metro quite knew what to do with this extremely, sultry actress, and letting her to go the at the time "lesser studio", Universal, to make a film that had all the makings of a hit, looked like a good thing at the time,--and it was!
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