The actor John Wayne was blackmailed into firing: “Either you star or I’m out”
When he began growing tired of being pushed into roles and movies he wouldn’t necessarily have made if it were up to him, John Wayne did what several of his peers had been doing for years and formed his own production company so that he gained more control over his filmic future.
Formed alongside Robert Fellows, the imaginatively titled Wayne/Fellows Productions built projects from the ground up that gave ‘The Duke’ the platform to tell the stories he wanted to tell, with some of the outfit’s earliest efforts including Big Jim McLain, Hondo, and Island in the Sky.
It wasn’t just an ego and vanity-driven move, either, with three of the first seven Wayne/Fellows Productions not involving the actor as an on-camera performer. One of them was 1954’s Track of the Cat, starring Robert Mitchum in the lead role. The ‘Golden Age’ favourite must have enjoyed himself, since he signed up to take top billing in the company’s next feature.
It might have been the eighth release under Wayne’s production banner, but Blood Alley was the first to debut under the rebranded Batjac moniker. The esteemed and Academy Award-nominated director, William Wellman, was brought in to oversee the adventure flick, which is when things started heading south.
Even though he’d literally just directed Mitchum in The Track of the Cat, the pair quickly ended up at loggerheads. The high-powered pair was joined by Lauren Bacall as the female lead, and when the cameras started rolling, ‘The Duke’ had absolutely no intention whatsoever of getting involved as a cast member.
Unfortunately, he was left with no other choice. “The third day of shooting, Wellman called my dad in a snit,” his daughter, Aissa, wrote in John Wayne: My Father. “He said Mitchum was drinking all night, sleeping through morning wakeup calls, making life miserable for cast and crew. As producer, my father urged reconciliation, but one day Mitchum stormed off the set and said he could not work for Wellman. Wellman insisted my father move into the starring role.”
The director and Mitchum went way back, with the former helming the latter’s only Oscar-nominated performance in 1945’s The Story of GI Joe, but things had evidently deteriorated past the point of no repair. “It’s either Mitchum or me,” Wellman told Wayne. “Either you star, or I’m out of the picture.”
‘The Duke’ relented and gave the wayward actor his marching orders, but he still didn’t want to join the ensemble because he was on his honeymoon. However, when Jack Warner called him up and threatened to pull out of Blood Alley unless a star of a similar calibre was recruited as his replacement, Wayne was out of options after Gregory Peck turned down an offer and Humphrey Bogart refused to do it for less than $500,000.
Wellman would quit if Mitchum stayed on board, but Wayne still didn’t want to take on the lead role. He either had to act in the film or find a new director, and when two fellow silver screen icons knocked back his overtures, the only card he had left to play was accepting the filmmaker’s ultimatum and embodying merchant sailor Tom Wilder.
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