Look Glue's Talking! - Hollywood's Knacker's Yard, Part 1
They all looked like sure things. So why didn't these motion pictures make it past the finishing post?
I, Claudius (1937)
The victims Charles Laughton, Flora Robson, Merle Oberon, Josef von Sternberg (director)
The gist In his twilight years, the Emperor Claudius [Laughton] reflects on a life lived in a Rome that was every bit as grand as it was deceitful.
The death blow Josef von Sternberg hated Charles Laughton. The source of his rage was the length of time it took the actor to get a handle on his role. It’s also possible that von Sternberg found it hard to stomach Laughton because of his arrogance and his close friendship with I, Claudius producer Alexander Korda, who’d directed Charles to an Oscar in The Private Life Of Henry VIII. Whatever the reason, the German helmer became desperate to quit the picture, so much so that, when Laughton’s co-star Merle Oberon received superficial wounds in a road accident,
he exaggerated the injuries to Korda and walked out, forcing the studio to abandon the half-finished film. But Laughton had the last laugh. For as he was delighted to be free of a performance he considered hugely disappointing, he also took great delight in the fact that the Claudius cock-up effectively put an end to von Sternberg’s career as a leading director.
Were we denied or saved? Despite Laughton’s reservations, the I, Claudius fragments that appear in the documentary The Epic The Never Was suggest it would have been one of the great films of the 1930s.
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