The Modernist wrote:Matt Wilson wrote:Like I said, we'll never know what he was capable of. I mentioned earlier that Harrison Ford was a better actor. Now that I think about it, I'm not so sure. McQueen either, when you get right down to it. He was just smarter when it came to picking projects for himself than Burt was.
In a way the model for what he should have been was Clint Eastwood. Eastwood made quite a lot of light star vehicle type films ( what was the one with the Orang a Tang? You can imagine Burt in that!) but he always mixed it with something darker or tougher.
The key difference was that CE established himself as a talented director across several genres and almost certainly had a lot more control over his career than did BR.
iirc, the two appeared together in some long-forgotten 80s movie called City Heat or some such. Pretty sure that BR got badly injured during the making of that movie and he and his career never really recovered as a result of his lengthy recovery. Rumours that his enforced layoff was due to his being gay and having contacted HIV probably didn't help. A former girlfriend of mine who was a journalist interviewed him in the late 80s and came away with nothing nice to say about him.
Still, Deliverance was a fine movie that has dated very little and BR was excellent in it so RIP, Big Burt