The John Ford movie that John Wayne admitted he’d been miscast in: “I felt awkward”
John Wayne always exuded confidence. It was part of his schtick. Any hint of uncertainty and all that messianic swaggering would have come crashing down. Many of his co-stars said that he was equally at ease with himself off camera. He even managed to win over Katharine Hepburn and Kirk Douglas, who hated his politics but had to admit that he wasn’t bad to work with.
The one person who always sent him cowering, though, was John Ford, Hollywood’s most infamously tyrannical director. Even by David O Russell standards, Ford was a bridge-burning bully. He drew out performances from actors by belittling them, humiliating them in front of the rest of the cast and crew, and threatening to hire someone else. No matter how famous Wayne got, Ford never eased off on his cruelty. Somehow, though, their relationship worked. They made 14 movies together, including Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, all of which were some of the greatest films of either of their careers.
Believe it or not, Ford’s brutality was not the reason Wayne felt embarrassed throughout the production of the 1963 film Donovan’s Reef. It was one of the collaborators’ few non-westerns, and it failed to justify the deviation. Set in French Polynesia, it stars Wayne as a World War II veteran living on an island with fellow vets Lee Marvin and Jack Warden. They’re all living the dream until Warden’s daughter shows up to claim a stake in the family fortune, and his friends try to help him out by creating an elaborate charade to turn her away.
It’s a broad comedy, something Wayne was never particularly good at, and the production was plagued by bad behaviour. Ford’s health was flagging, and Wayne and Marvin took advantage of their distance from Hollywood to embark on late-night benders that threw the shooting schedule off. What really made Wayne self-conscious, however, was the fact that his character was supposed to fall in love with Elizabeth Allen’s character. She was 22 years his junior but, thanks to his lifelong smoking habit, looked a solid three decades younger at least. Their pairing was incongruous, and he knew it.
Before production started, Wayne had asked Ford to substitute Allen with his favourite leading lady, Maureen O’Hara. She was a mere 13 years younger and had already elevated the Ford/Wayne collaborations Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, and The Wings of Eagles, but for whatever reason, Ford wasn’t interested. He resorted to his usual approach: offence instead of defence, asking Wayne, “Are you going to be the one who tells her she’s perfect because she’s old?”
The actor backed down, and Allen won the part. It irked Wayne to see himself on screen with her though, and he eventually admitted that maybe it was he who had been miscast. “The script really called for a younger guy,” he said. “I felt awkward romancing a young girl at my age.” Interestingly, his wife in real life, Pilar Pallete, was the exact same age as Allen, though he didn’t seem to see the irony.
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