Audie L. Murphy Memorial Website Message Boards

On page 210 of the book, The Films Of Audie Murphy, there
is a rather unpleasent story about Audie while filming
The Texican. The source of the story is Aldo Sambrell.

Today I read an interview by Aldo, and in this interview
he claims the unpleasent story is about Broderick Crawford.
It seems Broderick was drinking and having problems,
not Audie.

Aldo says of Audie, "Audie Murphy was beautiful. Very nice
person. Excellent. Whatever nice things I say about him, its
the minimum of what he really was."

The Films Of Audie Murphy by Bob Larkins and Boyd Magers
needs to be corrected in future editions.

Thanks for that clarification.
I was very troubled by the story and had just read it within the last two weeks myself when I purchased the book.
I was in the process actually of trying to locate an address for Aldo Sambrell so that I could question him about the comment.
It is good to know he was misquoted as I would have perhaps had a difficult time at some point trying to explain that to my little boy Audie, as he gets older.
In what medium did you read the recent interview with Aldo? I would like to add it my collection.
I will send a letter today to the Author and the Publisher for future editions.
Thanks

_________________
"I believe in all the men who stood up against the enemy, taking their beatings without whimper and their triumphs without boasting. The men who went and would go again to hell and back to preserve what our country thinks right and decent."

Hi Dave,

The interview of Aldo is found in Wildest Westerns #7 with
Glenn Ford on cover. Can be found on ebay or at
http://www.wildestwesterns.com
two brief mentions of AM...the Aldo interview and the
Ruta Lee interview.

But it does clear up the AM story from The Films of Audie Murphy
that should never have been written.
(Now I feel bad for Broderick)

Fuller discussion of the two versions of this story here: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2 ... opic=14075

Aside from that, is the book worth looking into in terms of new content, or is it just the same anecdotes you can find elsewhere?

It is a story that should not have been told on anyone, probably, but there are many other sources, to this one citing, describing Audie Murphy as not drinking very much, so maybe the damage was not tremendous.

Hello All,
I have that book and the first time I read that part, I knew right away it was not truthful.
If you have read enough about Audie in various books, after awhile you get sort of a "Sixth
Sense" of what is truthful and what are either outright lies or just plain misunderstandings, and
I immediately just knew in my heart that he was really referring to Brodrick, and not Audie.
To answer your question Christie, as far as the rest of the book goes, I really liked it. It seemed
to me there was more information that I garnered on Audie not read elsewhere in another book.
Also the book appeared to be respectful of Audie and his talent as an actor, not to mention the
many times he would help out other cast members in a movie he was making, or he would hear
where a fellow actor or stuntman was having difficulties, quietly behind the scenes Audie would
in someway help out. There were a couple of stories along those lines in there, that honestly I
did not recall reading somewhere else. So yes, I liked the book. Just my thoughts..
Shirley Jean.

Thank you, Shirley Jean! That's good to know.

Having just bought this book, I can confirm that the one anecdote from Aldo now has Crawford instead of Murphy listed.

On the whole it was an interesting read-it definitely benefits from Magers's contacts with the stuntman/character actor world, since that's where the bulk of Murphy's friends were, the bulk of the surviving people who had any meaningful interaction with him. The very brief biographical sketch at the front suffers from being by the Australian Larkins, insofar as it's being written by a guy on the other side of the world from his subject and with kind of limited access to news about him. (Case in point: David Gofstein is referenced as a greyhound trainer, when all available evidence is that he was primarily a trainer of guard dogs.) But it's reasonably sympathetic and the inaccuracies are relatively minor.

I pretty much uniformly disagreed with Larkins's critical assessments of the films, and didn't feel like he had a particularly interesting take on them. What I've read of Robert Nott's book, for instance, I could see where he was coming from even when I disagreed with him, whereas Larkins just comes off as arbitrary. And frankly, I'm kind of surprised Larkins bothered to write up his reviews at all. If I were writing about a guy with a picturesque life who couldn't act and had a spotty film career with maybe ten or twelve good/interesting films, out of a whopping forty-four (which is Larkins's basic take on Murph), you wouldn't catch me writing five pages about the picturesque life and dozens and dozens about the spotty film career! Still, without Larkins's original manuscript, the rest of this book would never have come to be, and the oral history parts compiled by Magers are very interesting.