The director who called John Wayne a “pitiful” excuse for an actor: “He’s not the same person”
Few actors in cinema history have ever been as protective of their onscreen persona as John Wayne. Even when the industry was shifting in a direction that he couldn’t wrap his head around, ‘The Duke’ remained undeterred and tried his best to cling to his former glories.
That only made him feel even more like a man out of time, though, because as the ‘New Hollywood’ era began to take shape and dominate every aspect of the business, the ‘Golden Age’ veteran bullishly continued making the exact kind of movies people were lining up around the block to see in the 1950s.
Some of them bucked the trend, most notably his Academy Award-winning performance in True Grit, but with others, audiences could see the transparency from miles away. ‘The Duke’ didn’t need to tell anyone that he only made McQ to try and play Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry at its own game; it was obvious.
Even his closest allies started to turn against him, regardless of how long they’d been friends. Wayne and Howard Hawks made five films together from 1948’s Red River to 1970’s Rio Lobo, and the former considered the latter one of the finest filmmakers he’d ever worked with. However, after their swansong as a duo fell short of expectations, the legendary director launched a character assassination.
Rio Lobo was basically Rio Bravo and El Dorado all over again, and it was the weakest of the three by far. Whether he was showing himself to have a remarkably thin skin or if he had a point, Hawks was vicious in his assessment of why his final teaming with ‘The Duke’ had been received so negatively in most corners.
“He can’t move like a big cat anymore, and he has to hold his belly in,” he ranted. “He’s not the same person. He called me and said he wanted to make a movie with me because every picture he’d been doing was lousy. I told him I didn’t have a good story. He said he had one.”
Not that it was the most ambitious story, with Wayne once again pitching himself as an aging gunslinger. Hawks still made Rio Lobo, but he was never sold on the premise. “I said, ‘Duke, you’ve stood for something all your life, and now you want to throw it away for something like this?'” the director recalled. “‘My god, Duke, it’s pitiful, you can’t play gunfighters at your age anymore.'”
He still cast him as one, and they still made the picture, even if Hawks failed to predict what could have possibly gone wrong in summing up his hesitance in making Rio Lobo, a film that stars John Wayne as an old gunfighter, by insisting that he’d quite literally told him: “Nobody wants to see Wayne as an old gunfighter.”
Hawks had something of a point, since the box office takings for the star’s latter-day westerns were nowhere near what they’d been when he was in his pomp, but it didn’t matter; the complexion of Hollywood was permanently changing, and since ‘The Duke’ didn’t want to join them, he tried to see if he could beat them instead.
He couldn’t, but it didn’t stop him from trying, and it’s equal parts fitting and ironic that Wayne gave one of his best performances in his last-ever movie, The Shootist, where he played… an aging gunslinger.
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