‘The Duke’ by any other name: The John Carpenter character based on John Wayne
Despite making his mark in horror and becoming one of the genre’s most iconic figures through several seminal tales of terror, John Carpenter first fell in love with cinema thanks to the western.
It’s not something he’s ever tried to hide, with three figures from the long and illustrious history of the medium standing out as his most prominent influences. Carpenter may have never realised his dreams of working with Clint Eastwood, but the steely-eyed and grizzled heroes of Escape from New York and They Live made for acceptable substitutes.
Howard Hawks was another pivotal influence on Carpenter, and he parlayed that adoration into his work when he effectively remade Rio Bravo as Assault on Precinct 13. It’s hardly subtle, but by editing the film under the pseudonym of John T. Chance, the filmmaker added another glowing and much more obvious homage to John Wayne.
Bizarrely, Carpenter has never made a conventional western, even if it’s been a key component of his oeuvre since the very beginning. He came as close as he ever did with Vampires by putting a bloodsucking supernatural spin on the standard setup, but one of his most beloved features ironically started life as a period piece indebted to stories of white and black hats doing battle before becoming something else entirely.
Screenwriter Gary Goldman once shared with Entertainment Weekly that when he penned the first draft of Big Trouble in Little China alongside David Z. Weinstein, “Ours was about a cowboy in Chinatown in 1899”. There was no Carpenter, no Kurt Russell, and no Jack Burton at that stage, but a protagonist who “worked providing meat to feed the Chinese workers who were building the railroad.”
When Carpenter eventually came on board, he refitted it into the genre-bending cult classic it became. Having already instructed Russell to channel Eastwood as Snake Plissken, he turned to ‘The Duke’ for inspiration this time around. Or, as he put it on the DVD commentary track for Big Trouble in Little China, Burton was “John Wayne without a clue”.
Essentially, Burton is Wayne played in reverse. Whereas ‘The Duke’ was the stoic, commanding, and infallible hero who always won out at the end of the day, Russell slyly plays the lead as a complete and total idiot. He delivers his lines in a manner very reminiscent of the western icon on purpose, but just as deliberate is the buffoonery that makes it perfectly clear he’s never in control of the situation.
Carpenter even admitted that “Jack Burton is John Wayne”, with the caveat that “Kurt is playing it blowhard John Wayne.” He didn’t want the protagonist to be cool, calm, and collected, but that twinkle in his eye and laconic line delivery is ‘The Duke’ all over, with Russell putting his own stamp on the character to echo ‘The Duke’ while maintaining the repeated motif of Big Trouble in Little China making it obvious to anyone who isn’t Burton himself that he’s a dipshit.
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