When Harrison Ford replaced John Wayne in an unlikely role: “We all liked him”
They may have been two of the biggest stars of their respective eras, but Harrison Ford and John Wayne weren’t quite members of the A-list at the same time, which makes it all the more unusual that the former ended up replacing the latter on a western of all things.
‘The Duke’ was the face of the genre for decades and remains synonymous with it to this day, but the same can’t be said of Ford. In fairness, he was hardly a novice after appearing in episodes of The Virginian and Gunsmoke in addition to the made-for-TV movie The Intruders in the earliest years of his career, but it’s hardly a like-for-like comparison.
To add another bizarre layer to the series of events that culminated in Ford stepping in to replace Wayne, it was Gene Wilder who was caught right in the middle. Not that it was the first time he came close to sharing the screen with John Ford’s most famous collaborator, though, after ‘The Duke’ famously turned down a part in Blazing Saddles because it wasn’t in line with his established screen persona.
The comedy legend had already signed on to headline The Frisco Kid, where he plays a rabbi on a mission to travel from Philadelphia to San Francisco to build a synagogue. However, when he’s robbed and left with nothing to his name, he ends up being rescued by horseman Tommy Lillard, and they decide to head out on a shared adventure.
In his autobiography Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, Wilder didn’t seem entirely convinced that the casting coup would bear fruit. “Are you kidding? How could we ever get John Wayne?” he wrote, and the negotiations did eventually break down, leading the actor to seek a new scene partner. “So we lost John Wayne, and the search for a new co-star began,” he recalled. “I was asked to look at the work of an up-and-coming young actor by the name of Harrison Ford. Since we all liked him, he was hired.”
Ford wasn’t exactly an unknown anymore, with The Frisco Kid beginning production in October 1978, more than a year after Star Wars had become the highest-grossing release in cinema history. On the other hand, he wasn’t quite a proven commodity on the same level as either Wilder or Wayne, and that pressure ended up affecting both him and director Robert Aldrich during filming.
“I think every time Aldrich looked at Harrison, he saw John Wayne,” producer Mace Neufeld explained to the LA Times. “Harrison was aware of that, but he was always fun to be around, very funny.” Even at that, it may have come too late for ‘The Duke’ even if he had agreed to star, with the star becoming increasingly unwell and ultimately passing away from cancer in June 1979, only one month before The Frisco Kid was released.
