Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still

The “bad” 1970 movie John Wayne blamed entirely on the director: “He never should have tried”

Tue 19 May 2026 22:30, UK

It’s never the most professional look in the world for an actor to make a terrible movie and then point the finger of blame squarely at the director for its failings, but John Wayne evidently didn’t give a shit.

‘The Duke’ made a lot of bad movies, which comes with the territory of appearing in around 200 of them in a career that spanned more than 50 years, but he wasn’t always the sort of star who’d shift the blame away from themselves, so he must have been really disappointed in the end result.

At various points in his professional life, Wayne admitted that he was miscast, he only played roles for the money, he knew he was shooting something awful from the first day on set, and he thought he’d made something worthy of standing alongside his finest work, only to be proven wrong when the end results hit the big screen and imploded on impact.

Very rarely would he throw a filmmaker under the bus, not that it wasn’t an entirely unexpected or one-off development, but you wouldn’t have thought he’d have launched one of his favoured collaborators directly under the wheels, distancing himself from a subpar star vehicle that he made with the best of intentions.

‘The Duke’ and Howard Hawks made five pictures together, and while you wouldn’t catch him besmirching the director’s name on Rio Bravo, Red River, El Dorado, and Hatari!, not that he didn’t have his issues with some of those films, their final fling on 1970’s Rio Lobo saw Wayne declare open season.

“Rio Lobo is bad,” he matter-of-factly declared. “Hawks made the mistake of doing too much of the writing. Both Ford and Hawks could direct, but Hawks couldn’t write. He never should have tried. That was pretty obvious by Rio Lobo. He’d become sort of aloof, and I guess there have been too many showings in Paris of his films. He’s feeling that he’s a cult now.”

At the time of its initial release, it was a box office bust that didn’t paint either man in glory. However, what’s most interesting about Rio Lobo is that neither man could agree who was at fault. As can easily be inferred, Wayne held Hawks responsible for a movie that both admitted was a disappointment, but who did Hawks blame for its poor showing?

He blamed ‘The Duke’, naturally, insisting that the reason why Rio Lobo was such a meagre offering was that the leading man was too old, too broken-down, and too much of a shell of his former self to play protagonist Cord McNally to a convincing degree, which makes you wonder why they even bothered in the first place.

It was the most underwhelming ending imaginable for a once-formidable partnership, and since Wayne and Hawks seemed to keen to blame the other, maybe the truth lies in the middle, and they were both equally culpable for Rio Lobo being such a damp squib.