Welcome to Mooseport

The Six Pack

Six sorry retirement films from great actors.

by Matt Prigge

Mae West, Sextette (1978): After disappearing from screens during the Production Code-dominated ’40s, the saucy quip-slinger took her sweet time staging a comeback—26 years, in fact. In the ’70s, in her 70s, a heavily dolled-up West appeared in the notorious Myra Breckinridge and then again, at 85, in Sextette, both finding her dropping double entendres and putting the moves on young men (Tom Selleck, Timothy Dalton, Keith Moon, etc.) as though this was 1933 all over again. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t.

Gene Kelly, Xanadu (1980): Apparently the great hoofer wasn’t content to let Viva Knievel! be his on-screen career capper.

Peter Sellers, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980) and The Trail of the Pink Panther (1982): Sellers died soon after the troubled production of Fu Manchu, an ignominious finale by any standard. If only that were the end. Not letting the death of his lead actor stop him from milking the Pink Panther franchise beyond dry, Blake Edwards brought Inspector Clouseau back two years later via awkwardly integrated unused Sellers footage. If that weren’t crasstastic enough, Edwards also forced 72-year-old David Niven to return, even though he was so weak his voice had to be dubbed by Rich Little.

Orson Welles, Transformers: The Movie (1986):If Citizen Kane was in fact a prediction of the future that awaited its maker, then it should have ended with CFK dying shortly after voicing a rampaging planet—and unrecognizably at that.

Sean Connery, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003): Having turned down The Matrix and Lord of the Rings due to “not understanding them,” the Scotsman blindly signed up for this desecration of Alan Moore’s brilliant Victorian comic. His last decent movie: 1990’s The Hunt for Red October.

Gene Hackman, Welcome to Mooseport (2004): Dear Gene Hackman: I hear ya. The biz stinks and there’s no need to prove yourself. But Welcome to Mooseport? Come back once more. Pretty please? With sugar on top?