A Fox Exec Tried To Pay $25K To Shave Gregory Peck’s Face For The Gunfighter

Directed by Henry King, “The Gunfighter” was met with first rate evaluations upon its launch and has come to be seen as a traditional of the Western style within the many years since. Sadly, it additionally managed to lose twentieth Century Fox (now twentieth Century Studios following the Disney/Fox merger of 2019) some cash on the field workplace, a lot to the chagrin of the studio chief. Darryl F. Zanuck, who all through his lengthy profession in Hollywood proudly sported a mustache of his personal, was evidently none-too-pleased that Gregory Peck, beloved Hollywood megastar, had hidden his million-dollar face behind what was, in all equity, a reasonably minor mustache.

In “The Gunfighter,” Peck, who’d go on to guide a number of different Henry King options from “David and Bathsheba” (1951) to “Beloved Infidel” (1959), performed the function of legendary gunslinger Jimmy Ringo, who’s infamy prevented him from ever main a quiet life. Within the movie, Jimmy visits the city of Cayenne hoping to reconnect together with his estranged spouse and son, solely to set off a collection of occasions that in the end sees the “quickest gun within the West” slain by a budding gunfighter named Hunt Bromley (Skip Homeier). To painting this famend outlaw, Peck evidently felt a mustache was so as, and King agreed.

Within the 2021 e book, “twentieth Century-Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Fashionable Movie Studio,” creator Scott Eyman describes Zanuck as somebody who paid meticulous consideration to element. When it got here to “The Gunfighter,” one explicit element, Peck’s mustache, proved an excessive amount of for the studio head. It is a disgrace, then, that Zanuck occurred to be in another country whereas the movie was being shot.