Brand-Bond-Chaney
Does anyone know how these three notorious hard drinking bad boys behaved on the set especially with the down time caused by the Peck-Payton trysts.
Bond probably never drank on the set in his life. Brand and Chaney were far different cases.
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shareWhen I saw this movie on TV, during the Sixties, it was not only the first time I had ever heard of Gregory Peck. It was also only the _second_ time I had ever heard of Lon Chaney, Jr (after the original WOLF MAN)!
Despite everybody disparaging Chaney's character with the nickname "A-rab," his in-story surname "Kebussyan" and constant use of the word "effendi," make me think he might have been a former Turkish Janissary of Armenian parentage. The Ottoman Empire was notorious for "recruiting" non-Turks into that arguably elite regiment at about thirteen years of age. And this custom lasted from about the sixteenth century right up to the Janissaries' dissolution in the 1820's!
Kebussian was too young in the Indian Wars era to be a former Janissary. In the original novel by Charles Marquis Warren he was an Armenian but the soldiers all called him an "A-rab" because they couldn't find a country named Armenia in the atlas. And he did have memories of some sort of massacre in the old country, even though I think the Armenian Genocide started after the fictional date of the novel.
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