The iconic American movie Robert Duvall always thought was overrated: “It’s not acting”
Having starred in a few of American cinema’s greatest-ever movies himself, few veterans of the silver screen were more qualified to comment on which pictures fit that particular bill better than Robert Duvall.
After all, he appeared in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Peter Yates’ Bullitt, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, George Lucas’ THX 1138, Henry Hathaway’s True Grit, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now, all of which are seminal, iconic, or influential in one way or another.
Duvall was also held in the highest regard by his peers, collaborators, and contemporaries as one of the best to ever do it, with Tom Hanks admitting that he’d pay to watch the Academy Award winner cross the street, while his personal and professional relationship with Billy Bob Thornton saw him dub the actor and filmmaker the ‘hillbilly Orson Welles’.
The star’s seven decades in the spotlight saw him rub shoulders with icons of multiple generations, and he became one himself, with Duvall’s steely gravitas instantly elevating anything he appeared in, whether it was a prestige drama or an Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi flick about clones.
However, just because he dedicated his life to the medium and repaid that love in kind by going down in history as one of his country’s finest talents, he had some opinions on American film that not everyone would agree with, which wasn’t limited to comparing the transformative Bonnie and Clyde to a bad Saturday Night Live sketch.
If Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Ridley Scott, and many other top-level auteurs call a movie a towering achievement, an American masterpiece, and one of the most important offerings ever shot in the United States, then you’d be inclined to agree with them. Then again, Duvall was never one for singing from everyone else’s songbook.
“A lot of the old movies I don’t like much,” he explained to GQ. When pressed further, his answer was even simpler: “I just don’t like them.” When asked for a specific example, the prolific character actor pointed to one of its chosen genre’s all-time greats, and a film that’s basically got red, white, and blue seeping out of its every pore, for better or worse.
“The Searchers, I don’t care for,” Duvall declared. “Because it’s not acting. Except for John Wayne.” He wouldn’t dream of throwing his True Grit co-star under a bus, but beyond that, he was adamant that there’s nothing especially memorable, or even enjoyable, about John Ford’s masterpiece apart from ‘The Duke’ in the lead role of Ethan Edwards.
He was allowed to have his opinions and voice them, but that doesn’t make it any less surprising that Duvall placed himself firmly in the minority of people who don’t think The Searchers is as great as everyone else says it is.
