Arnold Stang died last week at age 91. He played one of the gas station owners in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, was the voice of Top Cat, and played a heroin addict called Sparrow in the 1955 film, The Man With The Golden Arm.
It's interesting to see comic actors in grimly serious roles. But I don't know if it always works. Margaret Mitchell wanted Groucho Marx to play Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind (I assume she was serious) and Benito Mussolini tried to his two favories American stars, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, to star in a production of Rigoletto.
Sherlock Holmes
And speaking of odd casting choices, Sherlock Holmes fans are upset over the choice of Robert Downey, Jr, in the title role. And the boxing. It turns out he claimed to be an amateur boxer in at least one book.
They were showing a bunch of the old Sherlock Holmes movies on TV yesterday, and they weren't good. All filmed in a studio. They should have gotten out onto the street once in a while.
The Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were set in what was then the present day, with Sherlock Holmes fighting Nazis. They were shot in a studio, so I don't know what stopped them from setting it in Victorian England.
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