Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [42]
Troubled actor Nick Adams, who had appeared with James Dean in Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause and then starred for two years in a TV western series, The Rebel, a role he won after appearing in an episode of Wanted: Dead or Alive, was someone Steve suggested and Siegel okayed. Steve and Nick knew and liked each other from their TV days, and though persistent unfounded rumors in the late 1950s and early 1960s that he was bisexual plagued Adams and hurt his career, Steve never believed them, because they had, on several occasions, shared women and drugs. After Hell Is for Heroes Adams’s career appeared to be on the upswing until his untimely death in 1968 from a drug overdose. In Hell Is for Heroes, he plays a Polish refugee eager to kill Nazis.
Bob Newhart, a former accountant turned entertainer who had scored big with his comedy records, made his film debut in Hell Is for Heroes in a role that tried to cash in on his specialty, funny phone monologues; his character is assigned to send a false report over a phone that has been bugged by the Germans. A perfect example of opportunistic miscalculation, Newhart’s appearance in the film only added to its oddball no-chemistry mix of pop-stars as characters. In his memoir, Newhart claimed that during the making of the picture, because of his hit albums his fees for nightclub appearances increased, and he looked for an excuse to get out of the film. He routinely went to Siegel with ideas on how his character could be killed off.
James Coburn, Steve’s pot-smoking buddy, was cast as a mechanical genius able to help fool the Germans by rigging a jeep to sound like a tank. Coburn brought his easygoing charm to a film that greatly needed anything to keep audiences awake.
Brooklyn-born Harry Guardino, who appeared in numerous 1950s TV shows and was also in the original cast of A Hatful of Rain, was cast by Siegel to play tough-guy Sgt. Larkin. Guardino and Steve did not get along well, partly because Guardino was a real-life Italian street kid from New York City and thought that Steve was not big enough to be as tough as he tried to come off onset. There was also some residual hostility from Steve because of A Hatful of Rain. Steve resented anything and everything from the original cast, and that put an X over Guardino’s name in Steve’s book. The rest of the ensemble included Joseph Hoover, Bill Mullikin, L. Q. Jones, Michele Montau, and Don Haggerty.
Steve was not very popular with the other cast members during the making of the film and, besides Guardino, found himself embroiled in a personality clash with Darin, who thought he was the bigger name of the two and the obvious star of the film. One visitor to the set during filming, veteran columnist James Bacon, witnessed some of the tension between Darin and Steve, took Darin aside, and tried to ease the hostilities by telling him that McQueen was his own worst enemy. “Not while I’m still alive,” Darin muttered back.
HELL IS FOR HEROES, set in Germany in 1944, tells the story of seven un-magnificent soldiers assigned to hold a single position for two days while waiting for their company to return from another battle. What’s interesting about the film is the interaction between the men in the company, their private mini-battles meant to illustrate their character differences, before the apocalyptic ending. As Steve intended, he died a star-status hero’s heroic death.
Underbudgeted at $2.5 million, a victim of Paramount’s hard times and Rackin’s lack of faith in it after his difficulties with Steve, Hell Is for Heroes became a perfect Hollywood-style example of Murphy’s law—anything that could go wrong did. Most of the props had a cheap, phony look about them and gave the picture a live-TV look rather