The “corrupt” 1969 movies that sickened John Wayne to his core: “I walk out after the first reel”
By the end of the 1960s, it was beginning to look more and more like John Wayne was a man out of time in Hollywood, which is ironic, considering he ended the decade with his career’s crowning achievement.
Henry Hathaway’s True Grit, which was released in June 1969, finally gave ‘The Duke’ the validation from his peers that he’d been craving for decades, and he was overcome with emotion when he took the stage at the Academy Awards at long last to claim his prize for ‘Best Actor’.
It was the culmination of his life’s work, but there was something lurking just over the horizon that threatened to upend everything he held dear. That was, of course, ‘New Hollywood’, and the more he rebelled against it, the more Wayne started to come off as an old man yelling at clouds.
The industry was in the midst of seismic, inescapable change, and there was nothing he could do about it. Naturally, he dug his heels in and continued to make the exact same type of westerns, thrillers, and action flicks that he’d been churning out since the 1930s, all while raging against the dying of the light.
Cinema had moved in a bold, drastic new direction, and he didn’t care for what he saw. Boundaries were being shattered, taboos were being broken, profanity was on the rise, sex scenes were becoming more prevalent, and the new wave of auteurs were doing everything Wayne didn’t want to see anyone do.
In effect, there was fuck all he could do about it, because change is inevitable. Clinging onto the last vestiges of the ‘Golden Age’, ‘The Duke’ stuck firmly to type, and even though True Grit saw him reach the pinnacle of his craft, a trio of other films made the same year left him sickened to his core.
As well as his distaste for swearing and shagging on the big screen, the western icon abhorred the rise of the antihero, and he surmised every single one of them as “psychotic weaklings,” and there wasn’t much rolling off the production line that tickled his fancy: “I haven’t seen many films lately that appeal to me,” he said at the time.
However, the prime offenders were Dennis Hopper’s transformative Easy Rider, John Schlesinger’s X-rated Midnight Cowboy, and Michael Sarne’s adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge, which wasn’t released until 1970, but completed principal photography the previous year. Sum them up in a few words, and it’s easy to see why ‘The Duke’ loathed them so much.
A drug-addled road trip flick, a drama about male prostitutes, and a comedy about a transgender woman who claims to be her own widow. Those three stuck in his craw the most, with Wayne’s general feelings on Hollywood’s new era encapsulating his feelings: “They’re so corrupt, or the approach is so cheap, that I walk out after the first reel.” Myra Breckenridge was rubbish, but the other two are stone-cold classics.
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