by Stephen Vagg
The fascinating career of a sixties icon.
In our recent piece on George Peppard, we mentioned that the original choice for Hannibal Smith in The A Team was James Coburn. The two men were not really much alike in terms of screen persona, but they were definitely contemporaries – both were leading men who came up via New York television and theatre, then enjoyed a relatively rapid rise to fame, and became best known for work in action flicks.
Peppard was launched to stardom sooner; Coburn lasted longer as a leading man in features, although he never had Peppard’s late career success in television and theatre, but Coburn won an Oscar and lived longer.
Like Peppard, Coburn’s reign as a star was undone by a cold streak of disappointing movies. But it was an interesting collection of pictures, far more eclectic than Peppard’s, and it’s a career definitely worth reappraising.
Coburn was born in 1928 in Nebraska and grew up in California. He was drafted into the army in 1950, when the Korean War was on, but got lucky and was sent to West Germany. Coburn’s army service enabled him to study at college and he decided to try acting, after which he moved to New York.
It didn’t take long for Coburn to get gigs, on television and radio, particularly in advertisements. Ads would be a great side hustle for Coburn throughout his career – he was not a pretty boy but had an interesting tough face and a marvellously deep voice.
Coburn was also a genuinely talented actor – just watch his movie debut, Ride Lonesome (1959) [above], with Randolph Scott, where he plays one of the baddies alongside Pernell Roberts. Coburn is lanky, confident, cool, dangerous, humorous – a screen natural. He made a terrific cowboy and was thus easily castable in the scores of Westerns being made for American TV at the time; indeed, Coburn guest starred in pretty much all of them: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train, The Rifleman, Wanted Dead or Alive, etc, etc. He did other roles on other shows too, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Coburn became semi-famous very fast. His third feature was The Magnificent Seven (1960), where he played a knife wielding mercenary, and he was given star roles in two short lived TV series, Klondike and Acapulco, though in each of them Coburn co-starred against a “prettier” male actor. He was not considered conventionally handsome by late ‘50s/early ‘60s standards in the way, say, George Peppard was, but this probably helped Coburn’s castability – he wouldn’t threaten insecure leading men.
In the early 1960s, Coburn went into a string of supporting film roles of astonishing variety and quality, as good as any of the great contract players of the 1940s: The Hell with Heroes (1962) with Steve McQueen; The Great Escape (1963) with McQueen and, well, everyone, famously playing an Australian (if he didn’t crack the accent, Coburn nails the attitude); Charade (1963) with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, as one of the villains; The Americanization of Emily (1964) with James Garner (taking over Garner’s original role when Garner was promoted to lead following the withdrawal of William Holden); High Wind in Jamaica (1965) with Anthony Quinn; and Major Dundee (1965) with Charlton Heston. He also had a cameo in The Loved One (1965).
All these films have a cult following; The Great Escape, Charade and Emily are acknowledged classics, as well as being big hits. It was as fine a “stardom apprenticeship” as any actor could hope for, and no doubt there was curiosity within Hollywood whether Coburn could take the next step.
Coburn got the chance to graduate to top billing with Our Man Flint (1966), a spy spoof from 20th Century Fox made to cash in on James Bond. Derek Flint was a super skilled, skivvy-wearing secret agent living with several women. Producer Saul David decided to cast Coburn, calling him “undoubtedly one of the most interesting looking actors in the business today. I would describe him as a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean Paul Belmondo – a true descendant of that bygone generation of character actors who became leading men by accident… Coburn has a fantastic effect on women filmgoers, and I think it’s because ladies go more for masculinity and charm than prettiness in a male star.”
Our Man Flint, while it has a lot of jokes that are, um, of its time, is a fun movie, particularly in the second half; Flint’s wish-fulfilment lifestyle is outrageously over the top and Jerry Goldsmith’s music score outstanding. The movie came out at just the right time – it was one of the first spy spoofs (a genre that became very tired very quickly) – and was a huge hit. A great deal of this success (correctly) was attributed to Coburn. What other actor could have pulled it off? He had a laconic, suave, rugged look, not too pretty, a nice sense of humour. It helped that in real life Coburn was a pot smoker who’d served in the military but went his own way in life, a genuine counterculture figure who was into cars, karate, and poetry – all came through for Derek Flint. (His daughter in law Robyn Coburn wrote a terrific biography, Dervish Dust: The Life and Words of James Coburn). Maybe it would’ve worked with someone else, but who? Think about it – Paul Newman was too earnest, Jack Lemmon too goofy.
Coburn’s next film was made before Our Man Flint had been released, so he shared top billing – a Blake Edwards comedy about some soldiers who take out time from the war: What Did you Do in the War, Daddy? Coborn doesn’t actually have a very good part – the leads are really Dick Shawn and Sergio Fantoni, with Coburn shunted to the side. The film was a box office disappointment. Daddy’s producer, Walter Hirsch, later blamed the casting of Coburn and Shaw, calling them “hardly big comedic box-office attractions. They were fashionable, but not the personalities who would promise an audience in a big comedic romp. I think its casting certainly affected its grossing potential.” Maybe 1966 was too early for this sort of anti-war comedy – a few more years in the Vietnam quagmire might’ve made audiences more receptive. The film has a big cult, though.
Coburn was more front and centre with Dead Head on a Merry-Go-Round (1966), a heist film in which every woman finds Coburn irresistible, and he imitates an Australian at the end. The movie is best remembered today for featuring Harrison Ford in a small role delivering a telegram. It did not do well at the box office either.
Fortunately for Coburn there was a sequel, In Like Flint (1967), although it’s much worse than Our Man Flint, weighed down by its plot about Flint fighting feminists, which is handled with all the sensitivity that you’d expect (the film feels like it was made by men going through a divorce). It made money, but Coburn didn’t want to do any more Flint films. In hindsight, this was a mistake, probably the biggest one of his career – popular franchises don’t come along that often.
Coburn went into a comic Western produced by Edwards, Waterhole No. 3 (1967); it had a comic subplot about rape which is about as funny as it sounds. Far better was The President’s Analyst (1967), an off the wall satire from Ted Flicker. Neither film did well commercially. For Waterhole No. 3 that’s not so surprising but President’s Analyst is funny, surprising and clever. Maybe it was too subversive. Or maybe the public didn’t like Coburn that much. We’ll come back to that thought later.
Coburn had a hilarious cameo in Candy (1968), one of the best things about the movie. He then went into Duffy (1968), another swinging sixties heist movie with a terrific idea (upper class twits decide to rob their own dad by hiring an American) and Coburn rarely looked more handsome. The movie doesn’t quite work and was received without too much enthusiasm.
Coburn then did a hired assassin movie for Fox, Hard Contract (1969), which sounds like a try-hard commercial project (assassin falls in love) but it’s actually super arty, with lots of chat. Critic Tim Lucas declared that it “may be the artiest picture produced by a major US studio up to that time.” Coburn isn’t ideal in a role better suited for Lee Marvin, but the movie gets points for being different.
He tried for some more art with Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970), based on a flop Tennessee Williams play. It’s not a bad performance, but he’s miscast, as is everyone in the film, especially director Sidney Lumet. It was a critical and commercial disaster which basically killed Williams’ Hollywood career. And by now, studio executives would have noticed that every film James Coburn had starred in that wasn’t a Flint picture had underperformed at the box office.
He went to Europe to make Duck You Sucker (1971) aka. A Fistful of Dynamite for Sergio Leone, co-starring alongside Rod Steiger, and it was a relief to see him in a good film from a top rank director. Back in Hollywood, he was reunited with Blake Edwards for The Carey Treatment (1972), which took Michael Crichton’s excellent novel and turned it into a bland TV movie; Coburn’s groovy doctor feels out of place.
Many of Coburn’s starring vehicles had been directed by first-or-second-timers (The President’s Analyst, Waterhole No. 3, Hard Contract) – this was the case too for The Honkers (1972), one of several “modern day Western dramas” that popped up in the wake of the success of The Last Picture Show (Junior Bonner, JW Coop). Unlike Picture Show, which was about young people, they were all about middle aged rodeo riders who are sexually irresistible, and they all flopped.
(Sidebar: around this time, James Coburn did the first nude centrefold for Cosmopolitan magazine. They didn’t like it, elected not to use it and instead turned to Burt Reynolds. That can’t be good for the ego.)
In Europe, Coburn was in A Reason to Live a Reason to Die (1973), then finally worked with a top director again in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) for Sam Peckinpah – a movie with a traumatic production history but also many fine qualities. Coburn went in to another strong one in The Last of Sheila (1973), one of several stars in this terrific murder mystery. But then he made a series of films that were less good: Harry in Her Pocket (1973) about pickpockets, and The Internecine Project (1974), a great idea shoddily done. (Harry was a debut movie from Bruce Geller who made Mission Impossible and is worth seeing to watch Walter Pigeon snort cocaine – but, pickpockets aren’t that interesting on screen unless they also sing and dance.)
Coburn got lucky with another first time director, Walter Hill, in Hard Times (1975), a splendid film and excellent performance, although there was no denying that its star was Charles Bronson (according to Hill, this led to Coburn playing up during filming). He was also very much a second banana in some other studio films, Bite the Bullet (1975), Midway (1976) and The Last Hard Men (1976). However, Coburn was still considered a leading man for big films financed outside Hollywood majors until the late 1970s and thus starred in movies like Sky Riders (1976), Cross of Iron (1977) for Peckinpah, Firepower (1979) (replacing Charles Bronson at the last minute), Goldengirl (1979), Mr Patman (1980) (filmed in Canada), The Baltimore Bullet (1980) and Loving Couples (1980), as well as The Dain Curse (1978) on TV.
This was, on the whole, a very underwhelming run: the only one to make much of a splash was Cross of Iron, and that was mostly in Europe (the movie is arguably Peckinpah’s last really good one; Coburn also shot some second unit on the director’s Convoy).
Around 1980, the Hollywood studios decided Coburn was no longer a leading man and he became a support actor for the rest of his career – a job he did, it must be said, with much aplomb, even if he was mostly asked to play “white suit parts” as he put it. When asked to do actual acting, he could still rise to the occasion, like Payback (1996) and Affliction (1999) which won him an Oscar (though it didn’t seem to result in many better offers). He even came out to Australia to appear in Death of a Soldier (1985). His wonderful speaking voice ensured that he never lacked work as a voice over artist.
James Coburn’s career as a star is an interesting one because, looking back, we are not sure that he was ever a proper film star. A leading man, yes, absolutely, and for a time, Hollywood studios considered him a star… but did the public? The only time that North American audiences really went to see a film where Coburn was the main star was the Flint films. He had more of a following in Europe – Duck You Sucker and Cross of Iron were both big hits there, though that might have also been due to their directors.
Coburn struggled to carry a movie by himself. For whatever reason, he needed a very strong actor to play off against. For instance, in Waterhole No. 3 Carrol O’Connor simply isn’t strong enough for Coburn. In Dead Heat on a Merry Go Round and The Honkers, Coburn runs over all his co-stars. This isn’t a diss: only a few stars can carry a movie completely by themselves (John Wayne, Steve McQueen) – but it’s worth mentioning because we are not sure that Coburn (or his advisers) realised it. Furthermore, Coburn was often miscast – he was at his best as an affable, chatty figure, marvellous playing off against someone stoic (eg Hard Times) but not so crash hot playing stoic himself (Hard Contract). We also wonder if he should have played a stud muffin so many times – it worked a treat in Flint but to do it in film after film? Did audiences like it if it wasn’t Derek Flint?
Still, Coburn had a very strong career with scores of wonderful movies and performances. He spent his “movie star chits” on some fascinating gambles – and if they all didn’t come off, there were plenty that did (eg President’s Analyst).
