By Brian Hannan
All you need is top stars and top directors and
making movies is easy. Surely you couldn’t miss with a line-up that included
Sean Connery, Steve McQueen, Michael Caine, Dustin Hoffman, Lee Marvin, Omar
Sharif, and directors of the calibre of Robert Aldrich (hot after The Dirty Dozen), John Boorman (Point Blank) and Woody Allen. Or so ABC
must have thought when it set up a movie division in the late 1960s. Delving
into the archives recently, I discovered that Sam Peckinpah’s rodeo picture Junior Bonner (1972) starring Steve
McQueen was a box office stinkeroo. The picture lost $2.8m (about $15m in
today’s money). Not just on domestic release, but worldwide.
The movie was made by ABC in a disastrous five-year
foray into the movie business and McQueen was not alone in being on the
receiving end of a lot of red ink. The Sean Connery-Brigitte Bardot western Shalako (1968) directed by the veteran
Edward Dymytryk (The Carpetbaggers, The
Young Lions) was another loser - $1.25m
down the drain. At least Peckinpah redeemed himself with Straw Dogs (1973) starring Hoffman which ponied up $1.45m in
profits. Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s war film Hell in the Pacific (1968) dug a box office foxhole so deep it
buried a loss of $4.1m. But the biggest loser was Michael Caine. War picture Too Late the Hero (1970), directed by
Robert Aldrich and equally set in the Pacific, kissed goodbye to a colossal
$6.7m. And that was not the worst of it for Caine. The Last
Valley (1971), a historical drama set in the One Hundred Years War in
medieval Europe, written and directed by James Clavell (writer of Tai Pan and director of To Sir with Love) and co-starring Omar
Sharif, tanked to the tune of $7.1. Aldrich had little luck with ABC – his
lesbian drama The Killing of Sister
George (1968) starring Susannah York lost $750,000 and kidnap thriller The Grissom Gang (1971) another $3m.
The Oscar-nominated They Shoot Horses, Don’t They that restored Jane Fonda’s acting
credibility was $1.2m shy of break-even. Even Woody Allen’s magic touch
deserted him – Take the Money and Run
(1969) in the hole for $610,000. Check out the resume of Exorcist author and Exorcist
III director William Peter Blatty and you won’t find mention of Mastermind, starring Zero Mostel. At one
point it was set for a May 1970 release, but never saw the light of day. All
told ABC lost $47m before it threw in the towel.
Brian Hannan is the author of The Making of the Guns of Navarone (Baroliant Press).
UPDATE: The information contained in this article was derived from a 1973 article in Variety. It should be pointed out that the grosses cited for Shalako were U.S. only. Producer Euan Lloyd had different film companies buy the rights to release the film in various countries. ABC controlled the American rights. Also, funding for the film would not have come strictly from ABC. Lloyd would finance his productions by pre-selling them to various international territories, so ABC would not have funded the entire cost of the film. As the production was said to have done considerable business in the international market, it may well be that it was a profitable venture.