Your Morbid Thoughts for the Day . . .

From Daniel Finkelstein at the Comment Central blog at the Times of London, he's posted a list of ten folks you probably thought were dead, but aren't (how he left Abe Vigoda off the list, I'll never know).

Speaking of morbid thoughts, while watching a picture on TCM, they mentioned a particular character actor was the last surviving cast member of the film Maltese Falcon. This got me to thinking about something related.

What's the most recent studio or big independent picture where all the credited actors are dead?

The Misfits (1961) looked promising, small cast (with credits), and two of the main actors died before the film was released I think, but turns out both Eli Wallach and Kevin McCarthy are still with us.

The Conqueror (1956) comes close. An urban myth about exposure to fallout from nuclear testing causing cancer in all the cast has sprung around this picture, as many of the actors died in the 70s, but those actors were in their 60s and 70s by then, heavy smokers, and that isn't exactly an early or unusual death. Even this picture has one credited actor out of thirteen (and many uncredited ones) still kicking, Peter Mamakos.

This would be a difficult thing to research, but surely there are film geeks out there who could figure out how to search the imdb database more efficiently to figure this out, or happen to know trivia about some famed cursed production where every is dead and can rattle off all the bizarre ways the various actors met their fate.