I love this movie, but was surprised to hear that perhaps another actor was the first choice and for some reason left the film. Jimmy Stewart just happened to be in England and that is how he came to the role. Has anyone else heard this, and if so, do you know who the part went to originally?
Thanks!
mary
"Leave the gun, take the cannolis."
According to a Stewart biographer, Stewart had taken his family on vacation to England in the spring of 1950 at his new wife's request, after completing filming on WINCHESTER '73. He returned to make HARVEY and THE JACKPOT, then went back to the UK in September to do NO HIGHWAY. There's no mention of his replacing another actor, or whether he'd signed to do NHITS while in England a few months earlier. Given that it's a British-made picture it wouldn't be surprising if another actor, probably a Brit, had been thought of first (the character in the book was English). On the other hand, with American movie studios forced to used their blocked dollars in Europe in the postwar period, they frequently insisted on starring one or two American actors in the leads, to insure a film's box office success in the US, which was much the most lucrative market. THE JACKPOT was done at Fox and I suspect that's when Stewart signed to make NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY for their British subsidiary.
Stewart liked the idea of making the film since it had to do with aviation, his favorite avocation, but it wasn't a pleasant time. He had an emergency appendectomy during filming and also had problems with Marlene Dietrich, who wasn't happy about not playing the sexy, younger female role, and who discovered that the now-married Stewart (whose wife discovered she was pregnant with twins while in Britain) wasn't interested in resuming their old affair, begun when they'd co-starred in DESTRY RIDES AGAIN in 1939.
Interesting. About Marlene, she cannot have expected to play a sexy young kitten at fifty! Even so, she still looks and sounds stunning.
shareWell, maybe Marlene did expect to play the "sexy" lead...which in a sense I guess she did, since Glynis Johns was more a "home-maker" type in this film. Even through the 1950s, Marlene made sure she was the principal female performer in nearly all her films, and always took care to make her roles as sexy as possible. She was very preoccupied with her image, all her life...the reason why, after she quit performing in the 70s, she disappeared into her Paris apartment and would never even let old friends see her -- she wanted the world to remember only the glamorous image. A bit sad, actually. Anyway, even in her 50s she was still taking as many lovers (women as well as men) as she could find, exactly as she always had!
shareIt's supposed to be about this time that Dietrich complained to her old cameraman that he wasn't photographing her as well as he did in the 30's. He gently reminded her that he had been much younger then.
sharenot first choice? wow and to think how brilliant he was in this!When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...
He was good in the film as usual, but the fact he's the only Brit in the film who isn't played by a Brit is somewhat distracting to me.
share[deleted]
Ohhh, thank you. That is the main reason I came to IMDB tonight. I wanted to know why they kept calling him a British scientist when he was not even trying to sound British.
shareIt occurs to me that perhaps Jack Hawkins might have been penciled in.
It's the kind of "lone man against the powerful" that he played so well.
Just a thought...
Come on lads, bags of swank!
Yup. In the dialog early on. Something like "Rhodes scholar, but he's still here..." as well as almost apologizing that he's America.
shareI was thinking maybe Stewart was not the first choice because kind of oddly twice in the movie he is referred to as a "little man". I don't think many would consider Jimmy Stewart to be a little man.
shareHis self-effacing demeaner would be considered "little".
Come and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarbles - Alex DeLarge
This role was classic Jimmy Stewart, a man fighting against great odds over what he knows to be true. I can imagine any number of British actors playing Honey- Alistair Simms comes to mind. No one could quite match Stewart in those impassioned speeches.
shareI'm sure there were British actors who could have tackled that role but they would have been very different from Stewart if only because Stewart was so typically American he brought a different sensibility to the part.
Alistair Sim (not Simms) was a splendid actor and very good at eccentric parts but he was too old (51) and comedic in his demeanor to have been good for this particular role.
Thanks for the correction. I had forgotten the true spelling of his name.
Not many actors other than Jimmy Stewart could have brought that passionate certainty to the Honey character with his otherwise mild eccentricities.
Agreed. Too bad they had to stretch the point a bit too far by making him an American who's been in Britain for years, since the character in the book is English (and "Honey" sounds more of an English than American name).
Stewart's eccentricities almost got the better of him in some of the early scenes, just a tad overdone in the absent-minded department. But he settled down nicely and became much more credible once he got on the plane.
My wife is English and when she was very young in the mid-60s, her family lived for a little while not far from Honey's home (and the Royal Aircraft Establishment) in Farnborough. I don't think she was crazy about the area.
I imagine it was very noisy and busy living near the facility.
The movie version stretched credibility too far with Honey not able to find his front door. They made the point he was wrapped up in his work.
Watching the movie this time as an adult, I was impressed with Honey's theories on child rearing and the development of Elspeth's mind. I wish more parents were that demanding and exacting.
Yes, not finding his own house and some of the other bits of absent-mindedness were more comic relief than credible parts of his character, and such things disappear soon enough, making them even less credible.
I've bought CDs with recordings of radio adaptations of some films, truncated versions of the original movies. The radio reenactment of NHITS was rewritten drastically and turned it almost into a comedy. It's much lighter than, and with little of the tension of, the movie. Stewart and Dietrich star in it, and Glynis Johns's character has been demoted in size. If I'd heard that before seeing the movie, I wouldn't have gone to see the movie.
But you were impressed by Honey's child-rearing theories? Really? Culled from a heartless textbook called "The Bringing Up of the Child" (though he did say he didn't find it "very satisfactory")? I value learning more than anything but one thing that's made clear in the movie (and book) is that Ellspeth is an unhappy child who has been turned into an awkward, isolated, socially shunned young girl because of Honey's obtuseness as a parent. You can't "schedule" a child's upbringing. To a point there is value and need in structure and discipline and a balanced upbringing, but while Honey's theory may have been fine his method of realizing it was pretty disastrous, cutting her off from all outside relationships. She also needed human contact, emotional involvement and to live as a child, not as the adult of the house -- which Ellspeth herself in effect confirms to Mr. Scott when she describes what her life is like. Both Marjorie and Monica see how badly Honey has fallen short as a father, which is a major reason why Marjorie knows she has to marry Honey -- that, and to set right his generally chaotic life.