Attention Must Be Paid: Joel McCrea

Joel McCrea claimed that Will Rogers told him to save half of what he earned and live on the rest—well, it was easier in those days, and far easier if you were making leading actor bucks. McCrea wasn’t as much a born-in-the-saddle type as some people believe; he was born in South Pasadena, filming location of Halloween and Spy High, among other things. Even in 1905, it wasn’t exactly rural. But he did love ranching, and unlike a lot of celebrity ranchers, he actually put in the work on his ranch. He also invested in real estate and was as rich from investments as he was from Hollywood.

To give you an idea, his first job was a paper route wherein one of his customers was Cecil B. DeMille. He went to high school with DeMille’s adoptive daughter and with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. He’d been a stunt double and a horse-holder while still in high school, and he studied drama at Pomona College, also doing some acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He even met Wyatt Earp during Earp’s Hollywood days—which doubtless later informed his performance as Earp in 1955’s Wichita.

Earlier in his career, McCrea would make a variety of movies. He was, of course, Sullivan in Sullivan’s Travels, one of three times he worked with Preston Sturges. He was in Foreign Correspondent, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He was in the early Humphrey Bogart picture Dead End and in The Most Dangerous Game. He was in These Three, the totally-not-The Children’s Hour adaptation of The Children’s Hour. Katharine Hepburn praised his acting abilities. He made all sorts of movies initially.

But what he liked, and what he thought he was good at, was Westerns. He did make two not-Westerns later in his career, but only two. He liked riding—he was considered one of the best riders in the industry, along with someone who had been an actual cowboy—and he didn’t think much of his own acting ability. But he could ride a horse and whatever else was required of him in a Western. So that’s what he did.

He also had, it seems, a problem with playing characters who were outside his personal moral code. He turned down The Postman Always Rings Twice because he felt the character was too much of a “gigolo.” He didn’t like shades of grey, from what I can tell, and he felt that heroes should always be, well, heroic. One suspects this is why he basically retired when the revisionist Western took over from the classic White Hat Hero ones. He didn’t like anti-heroes and said that John Wayne had never played one, which isn’t actually true but whatever.