The “high-class whores” who ruined the movie industry for John Wayne
Ageing gracefully isn’t something that everybody can manage, with the legendary John Wayne becoming increasingly curmudgeonly towards the end of his career, to the point where he was happy to load both barrels and blast them directly at the industry that turned him into an icon.
Now, it should be noted that, in general, Wayne spent a lot of timing aiming his gun in the world of cinema. For the most part, that was in his role as America’s chosen hero, slinging iron across the screen with a casual brutishness which endeared him to generations of film lovers. But, as time passed him by, he also began to fire shots at anyone who dared move too quickly.
Wayne was an old timer from his earliest years, seemingly devoted to the country’s most pleasurable leisure time; he lambasted anybody who brought un-American attitudes into Hollywood. His ultra-conservative ways made him a hit with many, but have since cast Wayne as more of a villain than he ever got to portray on the silver screen.m
One of the obvious yet integral reasons cinema has always been one of culture’s most important, popular, and commercially viable enterprises is its constant evolution. Standing still is tantamount to going backwards for Hollywood, but ‘The Duke’ just couldn’t seem to wrap his head around the changing face of the medium.
Of course, he reigned as one of Hollywood’s biggest draws by almost always adhering rigidly to type and playing a grizzled hero or gunslinger of some sort, but towards the tail-end of his time in the spotlight, the ‘New Hollywood’ movement began to emerge, with maverick auteurs telling stories that pushed the boundaries in terms of their depictions of sex, violence, and controversial subject matter.
For somebody like Wayne, that was completely and utterly unacceptable. He’d built his name on making movies that the entire family could watch together if they saw fit, and while many of his starring vehicles haven’t aged all that well when reappraised through a modern lens, much the same can be said of the actor’s personal, societal, and political viewpoints, too.
When asked by Playboy for his thoughts on the current state of the industry, his response was frank. “I’m glad I won’t be around much longer to see what they do with it,” he remarked before launching into a tirade aimed squarely at the very films that would help usher in a new era throughout the 1970s by bringing more grounded, relatable, and intimate stories to the masses.
Describing the people in charge of the studio system as “stock manipulators and bankers,” Wayne lamented how “they know nothing about our business” and are only “in it for the buck”. Of course, the entire point of the studio system was – and still is – to make as much money as possible, but that clearly wasn’t at the forefront of the western icon’s thinking.
Instead, he decried features incorporating nudity and titillation into their narratives, saying, “Some of these guys remind me of high-class whores” for allowing them to be produced. It’s a financially-driven operation and always has been at the end of the day, but ‘The Duke’ really started to show his age a little bit when he referred to anything even remotely provocative as being lumped into his own bespoke category dubbed “sex pictures,” which he inevitably deemed to be nothing but “garbage”.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, of course, but Wayne’s denigration of the next step in cinema’s evolution veered far too heavily into ‘old man yells at cloud territory’, especially when the ’70s gifted the world with some of the finest filmmakers in history, and a cavalcade of classics that rank as all-time greats.
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