“That’s when I finally realised the Western was dead”: Did this John Wayne movie kill the genre?
Even today, if 100 people were asked to name the first thing that comes to mind when they think of the Western genre, a fair percentage of them would reply with John Wayne.
The actor was synonymous with traversing the wide-open plains on the Old West, lending his talent and star power to dozens upon dozens of films that stuck rigidly to the medium’s established parameters. The classic western and ‘The Duke’ are virtually one and the same, but nothing can outrun change forever.
In the twilight years of his career, ‘The Duke’ became increasingly – and vocally – disenchanted with what the industry he’d dedicated his life to was becoming, with the advent of the ‘New Hollywood’ era ushering in a new generation where auteurs carrying full creative autonomy were tackling subjects that had previously been taboo, where on-screen sex and violence embarked on a drastic upswing.
Wayne absolutely hated it, but there was only so long he’d be able to continue relying on his tried-and-trusted persona in the genre that made him a household name before the winds of change inevitably blew through. Gene Autry was another who quickly became a man out of time, and he even pinpointed the exact moment he believed the Western died forever.
Known as the ‘Singing Cowboy’, Autry shot to fame in the 1930s as a crooner who portrayed the clean-cut, white hat-wearing Western hero, something that was only ever going to have a finite shelf life. To be fair, he was a star for three decades, but his act was rendered increasingly culturally irrelevant as society marched on.
In James Bawden and Ron Miller’s book Conversations with Classic Film Stars, Autry couldn’t hide his disapproval of where the genre was heading. “I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and there’s one scene where the antihero kicked the other antihero in the nuts,” he said. “Then there was True Grit, where fat old John Wayne with a patch on one eye kept falling off his horse. And that’s when I finally realised the Western was dead.”
Although the point he’s trying to make it clear, he did undercut himself somewhat by singling out a pair of Academy Award-winning classics to illustrate it. Of course, it’s undeniably true that the western was in the midst of a change as the 1970s grew closer on the horizon, but fortunately Clint Eastwood was there to lead it into a brand new era.
Whereas the classic westerns of old that Autry and ‘The Duke’ had helped personify were definitely on the way out, fresh from his stint as the figurehead of the Spaghettified boom, Eastwood became the face of its revisionist evolution through films like High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales. It wasn’t a death, but there was certainly a rebirth.
