“Probably the worst”: the movie Gregory Peck considered his career’s “crowning insult”
Having spent his career projecting dignity and strong moral fibre both on and offscreen, Gregory Peck wouldn’t instantly come to mind as an actor who’d take a steaming dump over their own work.
After all, he was one of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s most magnanimous figures, who spoke out against the Communist witch-hunt that plagued the business in the late 1940s, and apart from admitting to a brief extramarital affair with Ingrid Bergman when shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, he never found himself caught up in scandal or controversy.
Not that Peck had too many movies he had any reason to openly denigrate, though, with his filmography comparable to any one of his peers, in terms of consistency and quality. The Academy Award winner and five-time nominee had a decent nose for a strong script, leading him toward countless classic pictures.
His powerhouse turn as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird will always be his definitive performance, and that in itself is saying something when he also had Moby Dick, The Omen, Cape Fear, The Gunfighter, Twelve O’Clock High, Roman Holiday, and The Guns of Navarone in his locker.
That didn’t make him immune to the occasional clunker, and more than 40 years after it was released in 1951, Peck still couldn’t see past Only the Valiant as “probably the worst film I ever made.” Not that he even wanted to headline the cast in the first place, but he didn’t really have much of a choice.
As he recalled, he had a gentleman’s agreement with David O Selznick, although he was at pains to point out that he “was never under exclusive contract to anybody,” unlike most ‘Golden Age’ leading men. The mogul found himself in a spot of financial bother, so he leveraged Peck to try and get out of it.
An arrangement was in place for Peck to earn $65,000 from a Selznick-backed picture, but when it transpired that the producer didn’t actually have the cash, Peck received a phone call instructing him to report to the Warner Bros lot the following week to be fitted for costumes for a film he hadn’t agreed to make.
When he asked what the hell was going on, he was told straight, “Look, Greg, David is a little short on cash; he has sold you to Warners for $150,000.” With Selznick avoiding him and the deal having been signed and sealed behind his back, Peck had no choice, admitting, “I went and made the damn thing.”
Even at that, during his costume fittings, he discovered that the costumes he was wearing had another actor’s name on them, Rod Cameron, and as if it wasn’t bad enough that he’d been pushed into Only the Valiant without getting a say in the matter, his second-hand wardrobe was the “crowning insult” that topped it all off.
