John Wayne: one last shot before the final farewell - Telegraph
Classic Movies
John Wayne: one last shot before the final farewell
In 1976, battling the cancer that would kill him, John Wayne stepped in front    of the camera for one final face-off. The result was 'The Shootist’, a rich    and elegiac western and, says Philip Horne, a fitting swansong for    Hollywood’s most courageous gunslinger.
 
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His last stand: John Wayne in a scene from 'The Shootist' (1976), made when he was terminally ill with cancer. 
 
John Wayne in The Shootist Photo: PARAMOUNT/ALLSTAR
By Philip Horne
5:51PM BST 20 Sep 2010
During the making of The Shootist (1976), Don Siegel’s rich, elegiac western about an ageing gunfighter dying of “a cancer”, its star John Wayne became too ill to film. The actor had had a lung removed twelve years earlier and was now struggling with the stomach cancer that would eventually lead to his death in 1979. A few days later, when Wayne bravely returned to the set, he picked a quarrel with the director, who had carried on filming a gunfight scene in his absence, over the way his character was shown killing a villain.
He forced Siegel to redo the scene, declaring: “Whatever the cause, I would never shoot anyone in the back. It’s unthinkable for my image… I spent many years in this business building up my image.”
He certainly did – but he wasn’t the only one. The 6ft 4in Marion Morrison was a former USC American football player with a few bit parts to his rather girlie name, when he was spotted carrying an armchair across the Fox Studios lot by legendary director Raoul Walsh (one-eyed, but sharp-eyed). Walsh cast him in The Big Trail (1930) – a western, the genre Wayne would above all be associated with – and renamed him after Revolutionary War general “Mad Anthony Wayne”.
But it was director John Ford who turned Wayne into an all-time star, by casting him as the Ringo Kid, in Stagecoach (1939), which is perhaps the definitive western (though based on a Maupassant novel).
Wayne’s character makes his first appearance standing on the trail, firing into the air to stop the stagecoach and, as the camera whips in to a breathless close-up, he announces that: “You might need me and this Winchester, Curly!” In his dark placket-front shirt, light army-style braces, bandana and broad white hat, Ringo is a dazzling vision of male beauty and heroism. Wayne was already 32, with 78 films behind him – but the freshness of this “Kid” is unforgettable.
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The Shootist opens with a montage of its hero’s past exploits – taken from Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), Hondo (John Farrow, 1953), Rio Bravo and El Dorado (Hawks, 1959 and 1966). It’s clear this is a summation of Wayne’s career as well as that of his character in The Shootist, JB Books.
Younger film-watchers may not be so aware of the Wayne legend, or of his films – it was against the heroic Wayne, in a sense, that the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone (and then Eastwood) were angled; so too were the Seventies anti-westerns of Peckinpah.
Wayne’s fame is probably not dissociable, in fact, from the Cold War era – from anxieties about communism (his quite reactionary politics could be ugly) and gender (it’s often clear that his characters, men’s men, are ill at ease with women). But no one who sees a good John Wayne film (and there are many) will forget his complex, dignified presence. He was large, physically powerful, with a rolling gait, increasingly craggy as time went on – but always a careful watcher of others and a man of few words. He had indomitable courage and a basically decent heart, though also a quick temper and a capacity for black, violent rages.
The great Wayne films directed by John Ford don’t figure in The Shootist montage – they’re too distinctive and different in tone. It was Hawks (at least according to Hawks) who discovered that Wayne could actually act, making him the ruthless Thomas Dunson of Red River – and in that auteur’s view: “If you try to make a western with somebody besides Wayne, you’re not in the sphere of violence and action that you are when you’ve got Wayne.”
It was after this that Ford again used him for westerns – starting with the Cavalry trilogy of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), in which he plays respectively youngish, oldish and indeterminately middle-aged characters in three films within a period of two and a half years. Wayne had already turned 40 and the elegiac is the keynote of these films.
By the Fifties the western was being reshaped and challenged by new, noirish approaches. Although James Stewart (directed by Anthony Mann) and Randolph Scott (directed by Budd Boetticher) were perhaps the pioneers in the reinvention, Wayne played his part in it, too. Indeed, he is magnificent as scary, obsessed, conflicted, heroic loner Ethan Edwards, “a man that can go crazy wild”, in Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers (1956), which was an inspiration for Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).
Without his seniors, Ford or Hawks directing him, though, Wayne could be lazy or wayward and autocratic.
In his 1993 autobiography, A Siegel Film, Siegel is amusingly vivid about Wayne’s “difficult” behaviour. In the Sixties and Seventies, a grumpy Wayne complained that in the old westerns antagonists despatched each other by the gun – while in the new ones they preferred to talk each other to death.
But as the American critic Andrew Sarris points out, the (highly patriotic) films Wayne himself directed, The Alamo (1960) and The Green Berets (1968) are themselves very talky.
Good directors – like Ford, Hawks and Siegel – knew how to pare down Wayne’s dialogue and make use of his surprising subtlety.
Hawks said that on Rio Bravo, where Dean Martin is his wrecked, drunken deputy, Wayne wasn’t at first sure how to play their scenes. The director’s tip: “He’s your best friend, watch him. See whether he is coming through.” And Wayne replied: “OK, that’s enough for me.” It obviously was.
Toward the end of his career, Wayne often played parts trading self-consciously on his star image – and sometimes, in True Grit (1969), for which he won his Oscar, and The Cowboys (1972), for example, the films are seriously rewarding entertainment.
The Shootist, based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout, is the culmination of this reflective, retrospective tendency. It was known that it might be Wayne’s last film, so there’s a remarkable supporting cast – above all James Stewart in a fine cameo as the Carson City doctor (Wayne and Stewart had co-starred in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)), but also Lauren Bacall and the young Ron Howard (who would go on to direct Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon) – as well as the great western veteran Richard Boone.
The movie is set in January 1901 – Queen Victoria has just died – and in Carson City, Nevada, which has telephones, trams and motor cars, and is planning on introducing metalled roads, gas lamps and electricity. It is the whole 20th-century package.
However, Wayne’s character, the abrasive JB Books, almost sole survivor of the violent Old West, does not belong in this tame, commercialised new world – about which the film is pretty ambivalent.
A succession of venal characters try to exploit the nationwide fame of Books – by interviewing, marrying, burying, or stealing souvenirs from him – while quite a few others want to kill him.
The nasty little sheriff wants to drive him out of town. But while the film is tinged with bitter ironies, the touching drama of his relations with his landlady (Bacall) and her restless son (Howard), who idolises Books, plus our certainty that a John Wayne movie is not going to end with its hero dying of cancer, make it an involving, exciting experience.
The Shootist is a fitting memorial to a great star – and leaves his image indelibly fixed on our imagination.
Free John Wayne DVDs
Get The Shootist free on DVD inside next Saturday’s Telegraph; and another John Wayne classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with Sunday’s paper.
Philip Horne is Professor of English at UCL
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