The unfinished Jeff Bridges movie nobody has ever seen: “It won’t ever be released”
It must be frustrating for an actor to pour their effort and energy into making a movie the studio decides to bury. It isn’t a regular occurrence, but it’s happened on enough occasions to ensure that Jeff Bridges is far from the only star to effectively waste their time on a worthless picture.
While the film in question did eventually see the light of day, that doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. Bridges was relatively new to acting at the time and wasn’t even sure that Hollywood was where his future lay, and having one of his earliest credits swept under the rug wouldn’t have done much to convince him otherwise.
The 1970s Halls of Anger was Bridges’ first feature credit, which he had no awareness of after he debuted as a baby in his brother Beau’s drama The Company She Keeps two decades earlier. However, it wasn’t until The Iceman Cometh, his eighth picture as a working actor, that he knew he wanted to do it for the rest of his life.
He made the right call in choosing cinema over music, with his decades-long career allowing him to do both. He got an early taste of how things can fall apart in an instant in his second film, though, when he had the misfortune of playing the male lead in a bizarre thriller that ran out of steam long before the end of production.
Only a die-hard Bridges fan will even be aware that he took top billing in a British mystery thriller directed by the guy who played the Penguin in Adam West’s Batman TV show, where the actor’s Nero Finnegan becomes embroiled in a plot to sell government secrets that also involves a crime boss called Mr Go, a weapons scientist, and a secret sex tape.
Burgess Meredith’s The Yin and Yang of Mr Go sounded strange, but nobody knows how the filmmaker’s vision was supposed to pan out. The production ran out of money before the end of principal photography and was shut down as an unfinished and incomplete picture, although it was given a very minor run in cinemas.
That said, it was only released in a handful of Asian territories, and any scenes featuring Broderick Crawford as a character named Parker are widely assumed to have been shot and spliced into the film much later once Meredith and Bridges had already moved on to bigger and better things.
Almost a decade after he’d wrapped The Yin and Yang of Mr Go, Bridges was confident in telling Rolling Stone that “as of now, it won’t ever be released.” That’s technically true, considering it was never finished and wasn’t given the chance to play on the big screen in most of the world, even if there should be an asterisk next to its name when it is technically available to watch.
On the other hand, the film Meredith wanted to make and Bridges agreed to star in has never been seen in its entirety by anyone, leaving it as a curious footnote in the latter’s esteemed filmography.
