by Stephen Vagg
The Bridge on the River Kwai was one of the must-see films of 1957 – a guys-on-a-mission movie which had something “Significant” to say about the “Madness of War”, from a top-rank director (David Lean) and producer (Sam Spiegel), featuring A-list stars from Hollywood (William Holden) and Britain (Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins), plus a big comeback from an old silent-era name (Sessue Hayakawa). It won Oscars, got great reviews, earned bucket loads of cash, and became acknowledged as a classic. It also should have launched an exciting new star but didn’t – Geoffrey Horne.
We’re guessing at the mention of Horne’s name that even people who’ve seen River Kwai will go “Who?” But he actually had one of the biggest parts in the film. He plays the Canadian soldier, Lt Joyce, who accompanies Hawkins and Holden on the raid to blow up the bridge (Along with a bunch of Thai women who give them shaves and back massages in lagoons along the way… these Allied commandos knew how to do things in style… but it was a way of ensuring the film had some female interest, along with Holden’s perfunctory romance with a nurse, something many war films should learn from… sorry we’re getting off topic now).
Horne gets to participate in the film’s incredibly tense finale where (SPOILERS but it has been almost seventy years) he kills Sessue Hayakawa’s Japanese officer – that’s right, this key plot development isn’t given to one of the big stars but to Geoffrey Horne – and is about to blow up the bridge when he is shot due to the intervention of Alec Guinness, prompting William Holden’s final charge, etc etc. You can see it here.
As the young hunk in a blockbuster movie, Geoffrey Horne should have been launched to superstardom, or at least a Ric Dalton-style TV series. But it didn’t happen. How come?
Horne was an American, though born in Argentina in 1933 – dad was in the oil trade, and little Geoffrey was educated in Cuba, New York, West Virginia and California. He started acting at the University of California in Berkeley, then moved to New York. Through a connection of his mother, he auditioned for Elia Kazan – the part was in a road company version of Tea and Sympathy. Horne didn’t get it, but the Kazan meeting led to lessons from Lee Strasberg. Horne was the beneficiary of good timing: New York was then the capital of live television drama (a period that only lasted a few years) and he was a handsome young man who could play “sensitive” and thus soon started regularly working on stage and television, including playing the title role in a small screen version of Billy Budd under the direction of George Roy Hill. Horne was also accepted as a member of the Actors Studio, probably the key influence of his career; it gave him more street cred than most pretty boy actors of this time.
The Actors Studio had been heavily involved in a stage play called End as a Man, by Calder Willingham from his novel of the same name, about power games among the students at a military college. Producer Sam Spiegel decided to make a film of the play called The Strange One (1957), which featured many Actors Studio alumni including Ben Gazzara (the lead role), George Peppard, Pat Hingle, Arthur Storch, and little Geoffrey Horne as a cadet. The movie was not a big hit but earned a lot of kudos and was a neat first film credit for Horne.
The Strange One directly led to Horne’s casting as Lt Joyce in The Bridge on the River Kwai, which Spiegel was also producing. According to contemporary press reports, the filmmakers wanted an actor who was “virile but not aggressive, sensitive but not effeminate” to play Joyce. Horne said that they wanted to cast a star in the part but they were having trouble because the part was relatively small (and they were giving away a lot of budget already to pay for Holden). Montgomery Clift was offered the part and turned it down, Ben Gazzara was considered, Cliff Robertson wanted to play it, but then Sam Spiegel’s wife suggested they cast Geoffrey Horne, and he got the gig.
During filming, Horne saved David Lean’s life when everyone was swimming in a river and the director was dragged off into a rip – Horne jumped in after Lean and rescued him.
The Bridge on the River Kwai was, as mentioned, a huge success, and even if most of the kudos went to Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa and William Holden, Horne did get a bit of positive PR, including profiles in fan magazines. His status as a young hunk was confirmed when he went into Bonjour Tristesse (1958) from Otto von Preminger, playing a fling of Jean Seberg – still down the cast list, but a classy credit nonetheless.
Horne then went to Yugoslavia to appear in Tempest (1958), a historical blockbuster for Dino de Laurentiis, who was trying to repeat his success with War and Peace (1956) only with less famous actors from a lesser-known book: Tempest, based on a novel by Pushkin, had Van Heflin, Silvana Mangano, Viveca Lindfors, and Geoffrey Horne, in one of the lead roles, a young officer caught up in a Cossack rebellion. This was a huge hit in Italy, though did less well in North America – Variety described Horne’s performance as “okay” and that seems to have been the general critical consensus.
Tempest was, in hindsight, the turning point of Horne’s career. Because instead of consolidating/launching a career in Hollywood, he wound up receiving and accepting a stream of offers from Italy: Esterina (1959) with Carla Gravina, The Story of Joseph and His Brethren (1961) with Robert Morley (!) and Belinda Lee, The Corsican Brothers (1961), and Implacable Three (1963). These movies had him in lead roles and presumably paid well but they were not widely seen in the US, so the momentum of Kwai was lost.
In fairness, Horne did keep returning to the US throughout this time, but the offers appear to have been in TV – a version of Cradle Song (1960), an episode of The Twilight Zone etc. He kept up his links with the Actors Studio, appearing on stage with Jane Fonda in No Concern of Mine (1960) and Strange Interlude (1963) – he also auditioned alongside Fonda for the lead roles in Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass and lost out to Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood.
Still, it’s odd that Geoffrey Horne never played a lead in a Hollywood based film – even, say, a Western or another war film or something. Maybe there were no offers. Or there were, but he turned them down. Horne later said that he stuffed up his career by not embracing playing child/innocent/sensitive roles and instead trying to play “a man”.
Eventually, the Italian roles dried up and Horne moved to California where found himself regularly guesting on TV shows like The Green Hornet and The Virginian. He never lacked work, it’s just that the work tended to be guest spots or on stage.
Horne revived his career and mental health in the 1970s when he became a teacher. He proved to be supremely gifted in that sphere, his students including Adam Sandler and Alec Baldwin, who did a deep dive interview with Horne here.
He was married several times, really liked drinking but gave it up, had nine children, two of whom pre-deceased him. He’s still alive today.
So, what happened to Geoffrey Horne, potential movie star? Well, for starters, he probably lacked the individuality and sense of drive to be a top rank star like William Holden (that’s no dig – there’s nothing he could have done about that). He very much could have been a second-tier Hollywood star, or at least a far more recognisable Hollywood name, but he spent his post-Kwai career momentum in Italy or having relatively unexciting television and Broadway credits. Thirdly, he did kind of become a film star, it’s just it happened over in Italy. Finally, none of it really matters since he found what he was meant to do in life in teaching.
