Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [67]
All three were huge commercial successes, but Jewison had tired of the genre and wanted to do something a little weightier. When Kamen told him about The Cincinnati Kid he jumped at it. Kamen then set about convincing Ransohoff that Jewison was the right man to take over, based mostly on his string of hits, and especially Forty Pounds of Trouble, with its gambling motif. Ransohoff, hearing the tick of the studio clock and watching the film’s budget escalate, agreed on Jewison, and then promptly lost one of the film’s biggest stars, Spencer Tracy, who blamed his departure on poor health. Tracy had been set to play Lancey Howard, “the Man” (the Gleason-equivalent role from The Hustler) opposite Steve’s “Kid” Eric Stoner, and may really have been too ill to make the film, but he was also a big fan of Peckinpah and had not been pleased with his firing. Tracy had envisioned The Cincinnati Kid as something closer to a Sturges film than a Doris Day–type vehicle and counted himself out. He was quickly replaced by Edward G. Robinson, whose casting rounded out a talented group that now included Steve, Karl Malden, Ann-Margret (yet another Ransohoff “protégée”), Rip Torn, Tuesday Weld, and Joan Blondell.
The first thing Jewison did was to change the film from black and white to Metrocolor, to give the final, climactic card scene more clarity—he believed that color would allow the audience to more easily tell the suit of the cards. Everyone was happy with the move except Steve, who had envisioned the film as his artsy version of the black-and-white The Hustler. Now it was turning into the kind of film he had no interest in making, a big, glossy, star-studded mainstream motion picture.
At this point, Steve thought about leaving, as Tracy had, but Karl Malden convinced him to play it smart and treat The Cincinnati Kid as if it were his first big movie, which in some ways it was. This was a major studio production, with lots of top-name stars, Malden said, and if it was a success, it would help Steve gain all the future control of his movies he could ever want. Steve listened to Malden and stayed.
With the film’s budget now expanded to $3.3 million (including the Vegas hiatus money), filming resumed on location, only for some reason in New Orleans rather than the St. Louis of the original novel, despite the “Cincinnati” title of both, and with yet another key change: Jessup was out as screenwriter, replaced by Paddy Chayefsky. This in itself is not all that unusual. In Hollywood, a novelist is often lured into selling the rights to his book, usually for not a lot of money, with the promise that he can also write the first version of the screenplay. Most of the time that deal lasts through one or two drafts and then a professional is brought in (Jessup had written the film version even before the book was published, but Jewison wanted no part of it). Chayefsky, a veteran writer from the golden age of TV, had taken home an Oscar for his big-screen version of Delbert Mann’s 1955 TV drama Marty. However, little, if anything, remains of Chayefsky’s screenplay in the final version of The Cincinnati Kid. Steve didn’t like his take and had him replaced with Ring Lardner Jr., who shares the on-screen writer’s credit with a young Terry Southern