On Turner Classic Movies this morning they showed the movie Swing Your Lady which starred Humphrey Bogart. It was made in 1938, just a few years before Bogart would star in a half dozen of the greatest pictures ever made. Swing Your Lady is of such astonishing badness that it’s proof positive that there are some pictures that even a good leading actor can’t save.
Today I’m taking nominations for the very worst pictures made by the very best actors and actresses. Even the best of the best have made lousy pictures. Here are a few quick examples:
Tom Hanks, Bachelor Party
This picture is such a sleazy trifle I doubt anyone could have saved it.
Spencer Tracy, Plymouth Adventure
Spencer Tracy in a costume drama is always something to be dreaded but this picture is a particular horror (although The Sea of Grass is a close contender).
Tony Curtis, The Black Shield of Falworth
Whoever thought that casting Tony Curtis in a medieval epic was a good idea should have been fired. This picture had an A-list cast, director, and production values. Curtis’s performance is so awful it has a sort of grandeur.
Katherine Hepburn, Spitfire
Between 1934 and 1937 Katherine Hepburn made a string of movies that were really pretty awful, leading her to be labelled “box office poison”. Spitfire may well be the worst of this lot.
Nominees? To be eligible the actor or actress should be a legitimate A-list star—pointing out lousy pictures made by third rate actors is too easy.
It’s hard to beat John Wayne in The Conqueror where, as Genghis Kahn, he utters such immortal lines as “There are moments fer wisdom, Juh-mooga, then I listen to you. And there are moments fer action: then I listen to my blood. I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, take her!’
Rita Hayworth and Agnes Moorehead also participated in the epic disaster.
Best Duke line: “I shall keep you, Bortai, in responding tuh my passion.”
The movie may have killed the Duke, by the way. An unusually large percentage of those who were on the Utah set died of cancer. Atom bomb tests were conducted in nearby Nevada. Die for Rio Bravo or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or The Searchers, sure. But for The Conqueror?
Yeah, The Conqueror does take the cake. I don’t know how I left it off my original list. Wasn’t it Susan Hayward rather than Rita Hayworth?
Believe it or not I actually saw that picture twice at the drive-in: once the first time around and once on the re-issue.
My favorite line: “You are beau-ti-ful in your wrath”.
It isn’t just The Duke that turkey may have killed but also Susan Hayward and Dick Powell (who directed).
Yep, Hayward not Hayworth. A role I’m sure the former would have surrendered to the latter in retrospect.
Ben Afflick in Gigli.
I’m kidding.
If you consider Billy Bob Thornton to be A-list (which is not too much of a stretch) then the remake of ‘the Bad News Bears’ qualifies. Seeing Billy Bob in a kids movie is like watching a parole violation in progress.