Richard Harrison (born May 26, 1936) is an American actor, writer, director and producer. Harrison was very prolific and worked with most of the well-known names in European B-movies during the 1960s and 1970s, also branching out to exploitation films shot all over the world in the early 1970s.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Harrison left for Los Angeles at 17, where he found work first at the Vic Tanny and Bert Goodrich gyms. Many people working in the film industry trained at the gym and these encounters led Harrison to study acting. In 1961 he married Loretta Nicholson, the daughter of American International Pictures co-chief James H. Nicholson.
American film appearances
He appeared in a Santa Monica stage production, TV, and small parts in feature films. Next, Harrison worked at Twentieth Century Fox under acting coach Sandy Meisner where he made an appearance at the beginning of South Pacific along with Tom Laughlin and Ron Ely. He eventually signed a three-film deal with American International Pictures, which led him to Italy, where he remained for almost three decades, appearing in sword and sandal films, then Eurospy films and Spaghetti Westerns. Formal acting studies set Harrison apart from other muscular American actors working in Italy in the early 1960s, such as Brad Harris and Steve Reeves, with whom he is often grouped.
1960s European movies
Harrison relocated to Italy in the early 1960s with his first wife Loretta, initially in a three-picture contract with producer Italo Zingarelli. He remained in Italy and became a leading star in sword and sandal films, Eurospy films, and later Spaghetti Westerns. His first Italian film and first starring role were in The Invincible Gladiator (1962), directed by Alberto De Martino and Antonio Momplet. Harrison's most well-known film from his early career is the western Gunfight at Red Sands (Duello Nel Texas), directed by Ricardo Blasco in 1963. Gunfight at Red Sands is also noteworthy for being the first Italian Western to feature an Ennio Morricone score. Harrison turned down Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and recommended Clint Eastwood for the role.[1] Harrison joked that this was his greatest contribution to cinema.[2]
The Italian actor Bruno Piergentili who made European features during this period was given the name "Dan Harrison," perhaps to evoke Richard's name.
1970s exploitation films
Harrison's career dwindled slowly in the 1970s at the same rate as the Spaghetti Western died. He began appearing in low-budget movies shot all over the world: In Egypt (You Can Do a Lot with 7 Women, 1971), with the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong starring in the title role of Marco Polo (1975) and playing the German commander von Waldersee in The Boxer Rebellion (1976). Harrison worked in Turkey (The Godfather's Friend, 1972), directed by Farouk "Frank" Agrama, and as Sgt. Taylor in a Yugoslavian war film, the 1979 effort Pakleni otok, led by Vladimir Tadej.
He made most of his better quality 70s films during the earlier half of the decade, like the comic Spaghetti Western Due Fratelli,a.k.a.Two Brothers in Trinity (1972), which he also directed. His co-star in Due Fratelli was the Irish American actor Donald O'Brien, another veteran of Italian B-films. Harrison and O'Brien played two estranged brothers who rejoined after receiving an inheritance, Harrison a "lovable rogue" and O'Brien a pious Mormon. Harrison wants to spend his money on building a bordello, and comic adventures in the spirit of the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer hit My Name is Trinity (1971) follow.
Other notable early 70s films were Churchill's Leopards (1970), directed by Maurizio Pradeaux and also starring Giacomo Rossi Stuart and Klaus Kinski, in which Harrison got to play a double role; Acquasanta Joe (1971), directed by Mario Gariazzo and starring Ty Hardin and Lincoln Tate, an otherwise mediocre western worth mentioning for having Harrison cast against type as a villain; and Dig Your Grave, Friend...Sabata's Coming (1971), directed by Juan Bosch, is a western livened up by the presence of Spanish actor Fernando Sancho. Harrison acted in several films with Sancho, the archetypal Mexican bandit of paella and Spaghetti Westerns, most of which were produced and/or directed by Ignacio F. Aquino.
One of the more successful Harrison films from the latter half of the 70s was the Italian crime thrillerLa Belva Col Mitra (1977), a.k.a.Beast With a Gun, directed by Sergio Grieco, also starring Helmut Berger and Marisa Mell. Harrison played the part of Police Commissioner Giulio Santini, with top-billed Berger as psychotic criminal Nanni Vitali, out to kill Santini and everyone else who testified against him in court. Although La Belva Col Mitra is no classic, it's a well-directed movie, and the contrast between Harrison's underplayed style and Berger's manic performance works in its favor. However, La Belva Col Mitra is not without some controversy. Apparently, Harrison's scenes were cut down in the film at Berger's request. For additional trivia, a scene from La Belva Col Mitra shows up on TV in the Quentin Tarantino film Jackie Brown (1997).
In the 1980s, Harrison found himself mostly stranded in B-movie action films made in the Philippines and Hong Kong. Although generally considered the lowest point of Harrison's career, some of his 80s films have gained a cult audience.
In the Philippines, Harrison acted in five ultralow-budget actioners, best classified as Z-movies, produced by K.Y. Lim for Silver Star Film Company (called Kinavesa in the Philippines). Three, Fireback, Hunter's Crossing and Blood, Debts (1985), were directed by Teddy Page, and two, Intrusion Cambodia (1984) and Rescue Team by John Gale. All were bad, but the three Page films were exceptionally so, mixing near-sadistic violence with childlike, enthusiastic naivety reminiscent of the films of Ed Wood. In the books Gods in Polyester and Gods in Spandex, Harrison states that he wrote some of the screenplays for Filipino films practically overnight, using a pseudonym. For example, Harrison's "Fireback" screenplay Harrison wrote is credited to "Timothy Jorge," a pseudonym usually used by Don Gordon Bell, one of the expatriate American actors working for Silver Star. Harrison also mentions that the Silver Star films he acted in didn't have complete shooting scripts, and many scenes were improvised on the spot, contributing to their disjointed narrative.
Silver Star recycled the same group of American and European expatriate actors from film to film, all appearing in the Harrison vehicles. Mike Monty, an old acquaintance of Harrison from the Italian days who had migrated to the archipelago, James Gaines, Romano Kristoff, Bruce Baron, Ann Milhench, and others. Harrison struck a friendship with Kristoff, one of the leading Silver Star actors, and later invited him to Italy to act in a film he produced and directed, Three Men on Fire (1986).
When they were made, the poor quality of Filipino films hurt Harrison's reputation. However, they have attracted cult interest in bad movie fandoms over the years. Although he fondly remembers Teddy Page, Harrison doesn't have kind words for Lim and working for the Silver Star.
In Hong Kong, Harrison starred in what was supposed to be a small number of low-budget martial arts "ninja" films directed by Chinese filmmaker Godfrey Ho, with whom he was already familiar from working for the Shaw Brothers in the 1970s. However, Ho later re-edited his scenes into many more films in a cut-and-paste style of filmmaking that has since made him infamous. As a result, Harrison found himself the unwilling star of at least twenty-four different movies, with titles like Ninja Terminator, Cobra Vs. Ninja, Golden Ninja Warrior, and Diamond Ninja Force. Like the Silver Star productions, the "ninja" films have become cult films. Disgusted with that outcome, Harrison returned to the United States.
Harrison subsequently slowed down his film work over the next few years. His last movies were the 1993 erotic thriller Angel Eyes and the 2000 film Jerks. Angel Eyes was directed by the prolific cinematographer/director Gary Graver and starred Erik Estrada, John Phillip Law, and Monique Gabrielle.
Some of the more noteworthy movies in Harrison's later career were the Moroccan film Amok (1982) and Dark Mission (1987), by both loved and hated Spanish director Jesús Franco. Unfortunately, the latter might not be much better than Harrison's Filipino films in terms of quality. Still, it did have a more-interesting-than-usual cast featuring Christopher Lee, Christopher Mitchum, and French adult film star Brigitte Lahaie (also known for appearing in the horror films of Jean Rollin).
One of the few serious roles that Harrison portrayed in the 1980s was that of American President Andrew Johnson in Ali Hatami's Iranian production Hajji Washington. The film was completed in 1982 but was not screened in Iran until 1998.
He has since founded a now defunct, multisystem electronics company named Gladiator Electronics with his son Sebastian.
Harrison contributed pieces on his 1970s and 1980s films to two compilations:
Gods In Polyester, or, A Survivors' Account of 70's Cinema Obscura (2004)
Gods In Spandex, or, A Survivors' Account of 80's Cinema Obscura (2007)
Related Research Articles
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer, and screenwriter, credited as the pioneer of the spaghetti Western genre. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema.
Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero, known professionally as Franco Nero, is an Italian actor, producer, and director. His breakthrough role was as the title character in the Spaghetti Western film Django (1966), which made him a pop culture icon and launched an international career that includes over 200 leading and supporting roles in a wide variety of films and television productions.
The Sons of Hercules is a syndicated Embassy Pictures television show that aired in the United States in the 1960s. The series repackaged 13 Italian sword-and-sandal films by giving them a standardized theme song for the opening and closing titles, as well as a standard introductory narration attempting to relate the lead character in each film to the Greek demigod Hercules. These films however were not all originally made as "Hercules" films in Italy. Although two of them did originally feature Hercules, four of the films were originally Maciste movies in Italy, and the others were just isolated gladiator or mythological hero movies not released theatrically in the US.
Sword-and-sandal, also known as peplum, is a subgenre of largely Italian-made historical, mythological, or biblical epics mostly set in the Greco-Roman antiquity or the Middle Ages. These films attempted to emulate the big-budget Hollywood historical epics of the time, such as Samson and Delilah (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Cleopatra (1963). These films dominated the Italian film industry from 1958 to 1965, eventually being replaced in 1965 by spaghetti Western and Eurospy films.
Kenneth Donovan Clark was an American B movie actor. He appeared in movies in the United States and Europe, including the Secret Agent 077 trilogy, South Pacific, and a number of Spaghetti Westerns.
George Eastman is an Italian actor and screenwriter well known for his frequent collaborations with notorious director Joe D'Amato. He is most famous for his role as the insane, cannibalistic serial killer Klaus Wortmann in the gory 1980 horror film Antropophagus. He also played a similar role in its 1981 follow-up, Absurd. Both films were directed by D'Amato and written by Eastman.
Teddy Page is a Filipino film director and occasional writer. Page, whose real name is Teddy Chiu, began his career as a young man in the early 1980s, directing low-budget action movies for producer K.Y. Lim's Silver Star Film Company.
Mike Monty was an American character actor, born in 1936 in Chattanooga, Tennessee as Michael O'Donoghue but he changed his name to Mike Monty late in life.
Fireback is a Filipino low-budget action movie directed by Teddy Page (Teddy Chiu) and starring Richard Harrison, Bruce Baron, James Gaines, Ann Milhench, Gwendolyn Hung, Mike Monty, Ronnie Patterson, and Ruel Vernal.
Gordon Mitchell was an American actor and bodybuilder who made about 200 B movies.
Sergio Corbucci was an Italian film director, screenwriter and producer. He directed both very violent Spaghetti Westerns and bloodless Bud Spencer and Terence Hill action comedies.
Yoram Globus is an Israeli–American film producer, cinema owner, and distributor. He has been involved in over 300 full-length motion pictures and he is most known for his association with The Cannon Group, Inc., an American film production company, which he co-owned with his cousin Menahem Golan.
Eurospy film, or Spaghetti spy film, is a genre of spy films produced in Europe, especially in Italy, France, and Spain, that either sincerely imitated or else parodied the British James Bond spy series feature films. The first wave of Eurospy films was released in 1964, two years after the first James Bond film, Dr. No, and in the same year as the premiere of what many consider to be the apotheosis of the Bond series, Goldfinger. For the most part, the Eurospy craze lasted until around 1967 or 1968. In Italy, where most of these films were produced, this trend replaced the declining sword and sandal genre.
Bradford Harris was an American actor, stuntman, and executive producer. He appeared in a variety of roles in over 50 films, mostly in European productions. He was an inductee in the Stuntman's Hall of Fame.
Mario Gariazzo was an Italian screenwriter and film director. He wrote for 21 films between 1969 and 1992. He also directed 18 films between 1962 and 1992. He was born in Biella, Italy and died in Rome, Italy at age 71. Gariazzo is known to horror film fans for directing The Eerie Midnight Horror Show in 1974, and White Slave in 1985. He also directed the 1978 Italian science fiction film Eyes Behind The Stars. He worked with Klaus Kinski, Ivan Rassimov, Richard Harrison, Ray Lovelock, Martin Balsam and other genre stars.
Euro War, also known as Macaroni Combat, Macaroni War, Spaghetti Combat, or Spaghetti War, is a broad subgenre of war film that emerged in the mid-1960s. The films were named Euro War because most were European co-productions, most notably and commonly by Italians, as indicated by the subgenre's other nicknames that draw parallels to those films within the mostly Italian Spaghetti Western genre.
Django is a fictional character who appears in a number of Spaghetti Western films. Originally played by Franco Nero in the 1966 Italian film of the same name by Sergio Corbucci, he has appeared in 31 films since then. Especially outside of the genre's home country Italy, mainly Germany, countless releases have been retitled in the wake of the original film's enormous success.
Donal "Donald" O'Brien was an Irish film and television actor. In his near 40-year career, O'Brien appeared in dozens of stage performances and in more than 60 film and television productions.
Giorgio Ardisson, best known as George Ardisson, was an Italian actor.
Nicola "Nick" Nostro was an Italian film director who wrote many of his screenplays.
References
↑ Frayling, Christopher Spaghetti Western: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, Routledge, 1981, p. 145
A Fistful of WesternsArchived 2005-11-04 at the Wayback Machine , a Spaghetti Western site with basic profiles on some actors, general information, and an interesting image gallery featuring vintage poster art
A gallery of cover scans from vintage sword and sandal videos
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
