Arnold Stang, Sherlock Holmes

Arnold Stang died last week at age 91. He played one of the gas station owners in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, was the voice of Top Cat, and played a heroin addict called Sparrow in the 1955 film, The Man With The Golden Arm.

It's interesting to see comic actors in grimly serious roles. But I don't know if it always works.

Margaret Mitchell wanted Groucho Marx to play Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind (I assume she was serious) and Benito Mussolini tried to his two favories American stars, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, to star in a production of Rigoletto.

Sherlock Holmes

And speaking of odd casting choices, Sherlock Holmes fans are upset over the choice of Robert Downey, Jr, in the title role. And the boxing. I don't think he should have been boxing---it turns out he claimed to be an amateur boxer in at least one book. But they were showing a bunch of the old Sherlock Holmes movies on TV yesterday, and they were pretty bad. All filmed in a studio. They should have gotten out onto the street once in a while.

I haven't read any of the books. I don't know what the "real" Sherlock Holmes was like, which probably doesn't matter. Johnny Weissmuller was nothing like the Tarzan of the books, and Ian Flemming wanted David Niven to play James Bond. I heard that, in the book, Forrest Gump was morbidly obese.

The Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were set in what was then the present day, with Sherlock Holmes fighting Nazis and so forth. Every scene was shot in a studio, so I don't know what stopped them from setting it in Victorian England.