How a “hoity-toity dame with big tits” cost a John Wayne movie its director: “We’d had a few cross words”
Audiences assumed they knew what they’d signed up for whenever they went to see a John Wayne movie, and they were usually right. The actor had a formula that he’d almost always stick to, and when a director fancied shaking up the status quo, they usually didn’t last too long.
That was the problem with ‘The Duke’ in a nutshell; he was aware that his finely tuned persona could only bend in a certain number of ways, and because he didn’t want to alienate his fans, he rarely ventured outside of his wheelhouse to stretch himself, and he’d surround himself with directors who understood the assignment.
When he did step out of his comfort zone, he always ran the risk of making something like The Conqueror, so it’s easy to see why he was a little skittish. Then again, that mindset also saw him turn down Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, which would have been the two biggest breaths of fresh air in his entire filmography.
On paper, a four-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker responsible for some of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s most enduring titles could have brought something different out of Wayne, but not even Frank Capra was able to conjure anything other than an archetype out of an actor more set in his ways than most.
“I’d been hesitant about working with Wayne because we’d had a few cross words back in the late 1940s, but I hoped we could work well together,” the It’s a Wonderful Life director explained. “The biggest problem with Circus World, as it came to be called, was that it was the merging of two empires.”
One of those empires belonged to Samuel Bronston, a producer who specialised in big-budget epics, and the other belonged to ‘The Duke’. “I quickly began to see I would have trouble,” Capra confessed, and he was right. Despite being an accomplished screenwriter, Wayne didn’t care for his draft of Circus World, so he enlisted his friend and frequent scribe, James Edward Grant, to give it a do-over.
That was the exact moment Capra realised that he couldn’t work with the leading man, because he wouldn’t compromise his artistic principles to make a formulaic John Wayne flick, with one conversation with Grant proving to be the catalyst for his departure.
“Jimmy Grant told me, ‘All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee and spank, and a collection of jerks he can smack in the face every five minutes,” he recalled. “In between all that, you have gags, flags, and cases. That’s what his fans want.”
That wasn’t what Capra wanted to give them, and he was ultimately fired from Circus World. His replacement? Henry Hathaway, a member of Wayne’s inner circle, reuniting with ‘The Duke’ for a fourth time, who wouldn’t pose any problems in delivering exactly what the star (and Grant) thought the people wanted to see, with Rita Hayworth and Claudia Cardinale playing the two female leads, who probably weren’t hired for their acting prowess, based on the film’s modus operandi.
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