There's a rumor that the MGM executive who thought that Glenn Ford could fill Rudolph Valentino's shoes in the 1962 remake of Valentino's
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
would have been arrested had it been sufficiently proven that he was competent to stand trial. The World War I setting of the original Blasco-Ibanez novel has been updated to World War II, but the basic plot remains the same. A well-to-do Argentinian family, rent asunder by the death of patriarch Lee J. Cobb, scatters to different European countries in the late 1930s. Before expiring, Cobb had warned his nephew Carl Boehm that the latter's allegiance to the Nazis would bring down the wrath of the titular Four Horsemen: War, Conquest, Famine and Death. Ford, Cobb's grandson, has promised to honor his grandfather's memory by thwarting the plans of Boehm. At the cost of his own life, Ford leads allied bombers to Boehm's Normandy headquarters. As unsuited as Glenn Ford was for his role, co-star Ingrid Thulin was even worse: her Swedish accent proved so impenetrable that MGM was obliged to have Angela Lansbury dub Ms. Thulin's voice. A major misfire for director Vincente Minnelli,
The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse
was an expensive flop, forcing MGM to hope and pray that their upcoming epic
How the West Was Won
would save the studio's hindquarters (it did).