The 1956 movie John Wayne violently regretted not making: “Always said he’d cut his throat”
1956 was a hell of a year for John Wayne, with the best movie he ever made, the worst movie he ever made, and the movie he always regretted not starring in, all releasing within five months of each other.
Things couldn’t have gotten off to a rockier start when The Conqueror debuted in March, with ‘The Duke’ laughably miscast as Genghis Khan in a part that was written with Marlon Brando in mind, and beyond being a big-screen atrocity, gained infamy for possibly being the deadliest production in cinema history.
How do you follow up such an embarrassment? Well, if you’re John Wayne, you unleash The Searchers in May. The seminal western quickly washed the horrid taste of The Conqueror out of the mouths of critics, audiences, and the man himself, with the star in electric form leading his sweeping, epic magnum opus.
You could call it a year of extremes and still sell it short, but even for the ‘Golden Age’, where actors would frequently appear in a handful of new pictures every year, few swung so wildly from either side of the pendulum as ‘The Duke’, with those two movies representing his apex and his nadir.
If the stars had aligned, though, he’d have had a third. He was technically still involved, with his Batjac Productions company backing the film, but he could only watch enviously from afar as Randolph Scott played Ben Stride in director Budd Boetticher’s oater, Seven Men from Now.
You can see why he fancied the part: Stride, reeling from the death of his wife in a robbery, sets out on a quest for revenge, tracking down the septet responsible for her murder, befriending a pair of waggoners along the way. It looked tailor-made for ‘The Duke’, and he seemed to think so, too.
Boetticher, who’d worked with the star when he produced 1951’s Bullfighter and the Lady, was equally keen. “Duke gave me a beautiful script called Seven Men from Now,” he recalled. “I read 35 pages of it at lunch, and I had never read anything this good. I walked on the set and said, ‘Duke, this is the best thing I’ve ever read! I want to do it!”
The filmmaker was equally impressed that it was writer Burt Kennedy’s first original story and screenplay for a feature, with the scribe vividly remembering Wayne’s disappointment at his latest venture with Ford thwarting him from leading the cast in another western that he believed in every bit as much.
“Duke always said he cut his throat because he didn’t make Seven Men from Now,” Kennedy shared, even if he wasn’t entirely friendly with its director. “Despite the fact he gave Budd two big breaks, he and Budd weren’t buddies.” He may have been devastated that Scott took on the role he desperately wanted for himself, but at the end of the day, The Searchers was a decent way to make up for it.
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