MOVIE NEWS – Arnold Schwarzenegger is now one of the defining stars of action cinema, but in the late 1970s he received a review claiming that a horse showed more emotion than he did. The future icon had to wait years for Hollywood to stop treating the qualities that made him unusual as weaknesses and start seeing them as leading-man strengths.

It is difficult to imagine the history of action cinema without Arnold Schwarzenegger today. Commando, Total Recall, Predator, Conan the Barbarian and the Terminator films became era-defining hits that permanently tied his name to the genre. During the 1970s, however, Hollywood did not consider him an obvious future star. Studios saw him as too big, too muscular and too unusual for the conventional image of a leading man at the time.

Schwarzenegger landed his first starring role in Hercules in New York, where his voice was dubbed because of his accent. He later appeared briefly in Robert Altman’s noir The Long Goodbye, but then spent nearly five years without receiving another major film role. Finding an agent was no easier, since meetings and auditions ended with the same arguments again and again. In Netflix’s Arnold documentary series, he recalled the period by saying, “They all had more or less the same line: ‘We can’t sell you right now. It’s the ’70s. Dustin Hoffman is the hot guy. Al Pacino is the hot guy. These are all small guys. They’re the total opposite of you.’”

“Luckily, I Didn’t Need the Money”

Despite the rejections, Schwarzenegger gradually found roles that suited him better, and he was able to wait for the industry to change around him. He has said he did not need to accept every dubious supporting part simply to make a living because “luckily, I didn’t need the money.” That did not mean Hollywood or the critics treated him gently. In 1979, he had to read a line about himself that he can still quote decades later.

That year, he appeared alongside Kirk Douglas in Hal Needham’s Western parody Cactus Jack. The film failed at the box office, while the press was especially harsh on Schwarzenegger as he tried to transition from bodybuilding into acting. One reviewer wrote that “the horse had better facial expressions than Schwarzenegger.” The actor considers it one of the worst reviews of his career, and it is easy to see why. For a barely established actor, a line like that could have ended everything. Schwarzenegger did not let it do so, instead waiting for the moment when Hollywood needed exactly the kind of imposing, physical and unmistakable leading man that it had previously struggled to accept.

The 1970s were not entirely made up of setbacks. Stay Hungry, in which he appeared alongside Jeff Bridges, earned him a Golden Globe for Best New Male Star, and he was also considered for the role of Superman before it went to Christopher Reeve. His real breakthrough arrived in the following decade. After Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator, Hollywood was no longer asking how Arnold Schwarzenegger could be sold.

Cactus Jack is now more of an unusual curiosity in his filmography than a lost classic. Schwarzenegger plays a young cowboy escorting an heiress, while Kirk Douglas’s clumsy but determined outlaw uses traps, sabotage and increasingly absurd schemes to steal her money.

Source: 3DJuegos