The “unpatriotic” 1949 movie that cost John Wayne an Oscar
Arguably the most successfully typecast actor in Hollywood history, John Wayne tended to turn his nose up at parts that didn’t fit with the persona he’d spent decades meticulously crafting for himself.
It’s hard to argue with the results when he spent longer on top as a box office draw and A-list superstar than most of his contemporaries, but it did have a habit of coming back to bite him on occasion. ‘The Duke’ knew what the people wanted to see, and he didn’t have much interest in giving them anything else.
Of course, one of the side effects was that Wayne ended up turning down many roles that would go on to become iconic in the hands of another performer, and he even shot himself in the foot by rejecting a part that would win an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ the very same year he was nominated for the first time.
It’s irony at its most delicious, but it can’t be said that the face of the ‘Golden Age’ western wasn’t a guy who refused to stand his ground. Regardless of how much prestige the picture carried or how nailed-on it was to thrive at the box office or during awards season, Wayne wouldn’t even contemplate embodying a character who didn’t embody the values and beliefs he espoused on and offscreen.
When writer and director Robert Rossen was putting the pieces in place for his feature-length adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, The Duke was at the top of the filmmaker’s wish list to play Willie Stark, an idealistic politician who gradually succumbs to the lure of corruption after playing fair fails to reap the desired results.
A searing critique on America’s socio-political system that posits nice guys have a habit of finishing last unless they’ve got some powerful benefactors to grease the wheels on the way up, Wayne couldn’t sanction the country he loved so dearly being dragged over the hot coals of criticism and accused of being run by the rich and influential, and not the people who had the best interests of the public at heart.
He believed All the King’s Men “smears the machinery of government for no purpose of humour or enlightenment” and “throws acid on the American way of life”. As both an actor and a citizen of the United States, Wayne blasted it as an “unpatriotic” picture, one that ended up denying him his shot at Oscar glory.
Instead of All the King’s Men, The Duke opted to headline Letters from Iwo Jima, making the ‘Best Actor’ shortlist for the first time in his professional life. Unfortunately, the trophy ended up being awarded to Broderick Crawford after he accepted the part Wayne had been so quick to decline as a matter of principle.
For Wayne, though, the decision was never purely about career calculation. He had spent years cultivating an image that blurred the line between the characters he portrayed and the man audiences believed him to be, making it increasingly difficult to separate professional opportunities from his deeply held political convictions. Turning down the film was, in his mind, a matter of consistency rather than commercial sense.
That steadfastness came at a cost. Hollywood has never been short of actors willing to place prestige above principle, but Wayne was rarely one of them. If a script challenged his view of America too directly, no amount of awards potential was likely to persuade him otherwise, even if it meant watching somebody else reap the rewards.
While he wasn’t too disheartened about not emerging from the ceremony as an Oscar-winning actor, he was less than pleased with the manner of his loss. “I wouldn’t have minded losing so much if anyone else had won,” he lamented, with Crawford and All the King’s Men leaving him out in the cold on what could have been the crowning night of his career had things turned out differently.
