Trivia / The Wind and the Lion

• Actor Allusion:
  • John Huston plays the American Secretary of State. The film is heavily inspired by several of Huston's works.
  • Antoine Saint-John previously played a colonial military officer in A Fistful of Dynamite. Even their uniforms look similar.
• California Doubling: Though the story is set in Morocco and the US, nearly everything was shot on location in Spain. The scenes in Tangier and Fez were shot mostly in Seville, while the desert scenes and the final battle were shot outside Almeria, with the latter scene using an old set from Lawrence of Arabia as the backdrop. Roosevelt's scenes were mostly filmed in and around Madrid. The Sierra Nevada mountains, outside Granada, filled in for Yellowstone National Park.
• Cast the Expert: Captain Jerome's Marines who attack the Bashaw's palace were a mix of real American Marines who were serving at Naval Station Rota, and a special forces company from the Spanish Army.
• The Danza: John Huston as John Hay.
• Fake Nationality: Scottish Sean Connery as a Berber. Other Moroccans are played by Vladek Sheybal (Polish), Marc Zuber (Anglo-Indian), Nadim Sawalha (Jordanian) and Aldo Sambrell (Spanish). French actor Antoine Saint-John played the German von Roerkel.
• Genre Throwback: To classic Hollywood adventure films like Gunga Din and The African Queen, and the sweeping historical epics of David Lean.
• Life Imitates Art: The movie came out a week after the Mayaguez incident, where Marines rescued American sailors from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Andrew Sarris even joked that the operation was an elaborate publicity stunt for the film. No surprise that Gerald Ford enjoyed it.
• Vindicated by Cable: It was well-reviewed in 1975 but did so-so box office. Coming out a few weeks before Jaws certainly didn't help. In recent years, it's constantly shown on Turner Classic Movies, and the DVD and Blu-Ray releases have sold extremely well.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the original script, Eden Perdicaris was closer in age to her real-life counterpart (mid-50's), and her children were her grandchildren. John Milius wanted Katharine Hepburn to play her, but the producers demanded a younger lead.
  Milius: Her husband has died years ago, she's a stern, rich old woman, and she has a last romantic fling with this stern, rich old Berber, the Sultan of the mountains, who can't really do all the things he used to do but pulls it together one more time to save her from the Blue People. A very heroic character. And of course the children would look at such a character as being even greater than Sean Connery – this old man would be the greatest old thing they'd ever seen, and they'd have great admiration for their grandmother for standing up to him, the way old people can snipe at each other and love each other because they have the common bond of age.
  • John Milius originally wanted Omar Sharif to play Raisuli and Faye Dunaway to play Eden Perdicaris, but Sharif refused the part and Dunaway became ill due to exhaustion, having to be replaced at short notice by Candice Bergen. Anthony Quinn was also considered for Raisuli. Milius said he wrote the part of Eden with Julie Christie in mind, although she may not have actually been approached for the role.
  • Richard Dreyfuss was offered the role of Dreighton, the American Vice-Consul.
  • Milius wanted Orson Welles to play fictional newspaper magnate "Charles Foster Kane" (from his character in Citizen Kane) in the film, but the studio would not let him as they were worried about being sued by RKO. Instead, he used the real-life character of William Randolph Hearst.

---