Casting in Another Era

[phippsfoammattress]

Let's say the studios wanted to cast "Hello, Dolly!" in maybe 1936 or 1937. If you had access to all players at all studios, who would you cast in the roles. I think great casting would have been:

 

Mae West as Dolly Levi

Wallace Beery as Horace Vandergelder

Irene Dunne as Irene Molloy

James Stewart as Cornelius Hackl

Mickey Rooney as Barnaby Tucker

 

Are there any other people you can see in these roles?

Are there any other films from one era that you think could be appropriately cast with stars from another era?

[VP19]

With Mae West as Dolly, Jerry Herman's songs would have sounded quite a bit bluesier...but if we were going to have songs written for the film by a composer in 1936 or '37, I'd probably choose Harold Arlen.

 

Okay, how about this for a "what if"? Suppose Richard Matheson's "The Incredible Shrinking Man" had been filmed a quarter-century earlier, in 1932? (A man shrinking in 1932 probably would've made a good Depression allegory.) Whom do you cast as Scott Carey, the snrinking man...Louise Carey, his loyal wife...Clarice, the circus midget he has a fling with when he's scaled down to her size?

 

I'll go with Paul Muni as Scott, Joan Blondell as Louise and Una Merkel as Clarice. How about you?