The movie Sam Elliott doesn’t want anyone to see: “That’s a scary thought”
You may know Sam Elliot by his full head of grey hair, his even more impressive white moustache and deep, molasses-dripping, gravelly accent, but before the likes of Road House, The Big Lebowski, and 1883, Elliott was a dark-haired, moustachioed hunk with a 20th Century Fox contract.
As Elliott himself put it, he spent his “entire career on horseback or on a motorcycle”, being typecast in westerns and appearing here and there on television. Those years saw him star in some hits too, like Lifeguard and Mask, but his career is so vast and consistent, it’s difficult to even pick out all the best, let alone the underrated roles.
However, there’s one movie in particular that the silver fox would rather we didn’t see, a word that seems to inspire a great terror in the man, and that’s frogs, but no, the actor isn’t terrified of the amphibious creatures, but he does seem shaken by the idea of one of his earliest films of title being out in the world for all to access.
After years on TV and a few supporting film roles, the 1972 eco-horror Frogs was Elliott’s first leading role, and as you can guess from the name, it encapsulates all that is great and terrible about 1970s horror. It follows the actor as photo-journalist Pickett Smith, who meets a wealthy family being terrorised by frogs, snakes and other creatures. Seemingly, nature has decided to pay back the patriarch, who hates nature and anything that dares call his island its home.
Elliott is so young, he’s almost unrecognisable, and even his iconic voice hasn’t quite taken on that remarkable vocal fry, but he’s still a stand-out in the otherwise quite ridiculous film. Despite the fabulous film poster depicting a giant man-eating frog and the film’s title, you’ll find no carnivorous frogs here. Instead, each of the wooden actors (bar Elliot) either wildly overreacts or does nothing while being attacked by every creature except the titular amphibian.
In short, it’s silly, cheesy, features Elliott wrestling with some flaccid-looking snakes, and it’s magnificent. Forget Alien and Predator, Frogs should have been the real iconic villain of the 1970s, yet, for some reason, Elliott was horrified to find out his first leading role was available on Netflix.
“I didn’t know that,” he responded when AVClub broke the news, “That’s a scary thought. Shit”. Luckily for him, this wondrous ’70s creation has seemingly since been removed from the streaming site, so he no longer needs to worry about people randomly stumbling upon what is clearly one of his best roles.
In all seriousness, while he doesn’t seem keen on the world linking him to that movie, Frogs was actually the film to thank for his casting in Lifeguard, as the director’s wife spotted him while watching TV in bed and saw his potential, and Lifeguard was the reason Elliott eventually got cast in Road House.
As he so succinctly puts it, much of casting and acting can be about “baggage”: “I think a lot of mine was happenstance,” he explains, in reference to the accumulative effect of his career, “If you’re there long enough, you accumulate this…baggage, as Joel Silver called it”.
When he asked Joel Silver why he got the part, the Road House producer explained, “You’ve got a lot of baggage, and it makes you right for this part”, and apparently, a big part of Sam Elliott’s baggage is, well, Frogs.
