The Oscar-winning actor George Harrison always hated: “The biggest load of baloney shite”

Even if they won’t admit it out loud, everyone – audience members and industry professionals alike – will more often than not have at least one actor they can’t stand watching. For George Harrison, the subject of his ire was an Academy Award-winning legend, and he wasn’t afraid to say it.

As tended to be the case when The Beatles were involved and the setting was the 1960s, copious amounts of recreational drugs were par for the course. On a visit to California, Harrison and John Lennon were attempting to convince the other half of the ‘Fab Four’ to indulge in some psychedelics.

Making the situation all the more precarious, the band were also trying to avoid a journalist determined to get a story out of them at any cost. To take their mind off both the paparazzi and the LSD they’d ingested, the group opted to spend some time watching a motion picture in order to enter a state of relaxation.

Not just any motion picture, though, but Cat Ballou. Elliot Silverstein’s 1965 comedy western stars Jane Fonda in the title role of an outlaw who sets out on a quest for vengeance when Lee Marvin’s hired gun murders her father. Along the way, she gains the assistance of a faded gunslinger – also Marvin in a dual role – to seek retribution against the people who ordered the hit on her old man.

A surprise awards season favourite, Marvin ended up winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in what proved to be the one and only nomination of an esteemed career, while Cat Ballou was shortlisted for an additional four trophies, including ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. It was a huge hit, but not only did Harrison hate the movie, he may have hated Marvin even more.

As regaled in The Beatles Anthology, he was not best pleased with the movie night selection, and not only because it didn’t sit well with his drug-enhanced state. “The movie was put on, and – of all things – it was a drive-in print of Cat Ballou,” he explained. “The drive-in print has the audience response already dubbed onto it, because you’re all sitting in your cars and don’t hear everybody laugh.”

Admitting “it was bizarre watching this on acid,” his frustrations were compounded by the fact he “always hated Lee Marvin.” A combination of LSD and Marvin being projected right in front of his eyes unsurprisingly did not convert him to the cult of Cat Ballou, which he succinctly described as “the biggest load of baloney shite I’d ever seen in my life.”

Critics, paying customers, and awards bodies were quite clearly in disagreement, but for Harrison, the experience of watching Marvin pull double duty in Cat Ballou was one he’d never want to relive ever again.

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