Born 100 years ago this day, film and television actor Rory Calhoun (Francis "Frank" McCowan. 1922-1999).
Do you find him indistinguishable from Victor Mature? I always have. Mature was Italian, though, Calhoun was Irish. He was discovered by Alan Ladd with his shirt off (he was a day laborer) and referred to his wife, talent agent Sue Carol. Prior to acting, Calhoun had been a cowboy, a miner, a firefighting forest ranger, a logger, a fisherman, a construction worker, and a long haul truck driver. He had also been a punk. He'd been incarcerated for a long list of crimes: jewel theft, grand theft auto, possession of a dangerous weapon, and punching a cop. He gradually simmered down when he was in the public eye and had something to lose.
His first parts were bit roles under his own name. You can see him in such things as Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945) and The Great John L. (1945, as Gentleman Jim Corbett). Gradually the parts got bigger. In 1947 he was in a cool movie called The Red House (1947), which I wrote about here, and the surprisingly racy That Hagen Girl with Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan. While How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) was probably his best known film, he became especially associated with westerns, including such fare as River of No Return (1954) and The Spoilers (1955), and his own TV series The Texan (1958-60). In this context, I speculate that Liverpool rocker Rory Storm took his professional name from Calhoun, much as his drummer Ringo Starr also drew from westerns for inspiration.
Some time I might do a post focusing on his westerns, as I have seen a bunch more, but at the moment it gives me great pleasure to talk about his gonzo later years. It seems likely that the first place I ever saw him was in his role as a big game hunter in a Gilligan's Island rerun based on The Most Dangerous Game. From there it was just a short hop to such things as Night of the Lepus (1972), Love and the Midnight Auto Supply (1977), Mule Feathers (1978), Flatbed Annie and Sweetie Pie: Lady Truckers (1979), Revenge of Bigfoot (1979), and the notorious Motel Hell (1980), the only first run movie I ever saw him in in a movie theatre. Later came such things as Rowdy Roddy Piper's Hell Comes to Frog Town (1988) and Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force (1989). His last performance was in a 1993 episode of Tales from the Crypt.
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