Had I been born a couple of decades earlier my boyhood crush might have been Errol Flynn but growing up when I did it was always Audie Murphy, that baby-faced non-actor who just happened to be the most decorated soldier of World War 11. (He turned his experiences into a memoir entitled "To Hell and Back" which was filmed in 1957 with Audie playing himself; as a child I must have seen this film countless times). Of course, being the most decorated soldier of World War 11 in itself is no guarantee of or justification for a career in the movies so what did Audie have that enticed producers to hire him? To my childish mind it was the idea of this innocent, fresh-faced kid whose very demeanor radiated gentleness being able to handle himself in a scrap, of not being afraid to stand up to the bad guys. I doubt if it was this that John Huston saw when he cast him as the young soldier in "The Red Badge of Courage". Perhaps Huston thought Murphy still looked young enough to pass himself off as a bewildered boy.
That he couldn't act was irrelevant and perhaps because of that it was in a series of second-rate westerns he was usually cast. (There were exceptions; he seemed ideally blank and with just the right degree of annoying priggishness for the title role in "The Quiet American"). In "The Kid from Texas" someone had the bright idea of casting Audie as Billy the Kid, not as villain but as a poor-little-put-upon-me misunderstood youngster. It was an early film in his career and was probably even more of a non-performance than the ones which followed it, (just talking seems like an unnatural act to him). As for the film, it's a lame little Z-Western, brightly coloured and full of corn; Saturday matinée fare of the kind that would have given me a buzz half a century ago, simple and strangely innocent and light years away from the tortured psychology of Paul Newman and Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun".
That he couldn't act was irrelevant and perhaps because of that it was in a series of second-rate westerns he was usually cast. (There were exceptions; he seemed ideally blank and with just the right degree of annoying priggishness for the title role in "The Quiet American"). In "The Kid from Texas" someone had the bright idea of casting Audie as Billy the Kid, not as villain but as a poor-little-put-upon-me misunderstood youngster. It was an early film in his career and was probably even more of a non-performance than the ones which followed it, (just talking seems like an unnatural act to him). As for the film, it's a lame little Z-Western, brightly coloured and full of corn; Saturday matinée fare of the kind that would have given me a buzz half a century ago, simple and strangely innocent and light years away from the tortured psychology of Paul Newman and Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun".