John Wayne and Clint Eastwood shared a favourite director: “He was never too old”
Among Hollywood’s rich and storied heritage, acting titans John Wayne and Clint Eastwood always appeared cut from the same cloth.
Both were huge box office draws in their respective heyday, made up for a lack of performative range by nailing roles of steely, authoritative grit, and fawned over by Hollywood’s conservative end as enduring ideals of masculinity and paragons of rebellion.
Eastwood fit the anti-hero bill with greater authenticity, slipping into roles like ‘The Man with No Name’ or Inspector ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan with ease, while Wayne was a vociferous, pro-establishment toad who enthusiastically hounded many in the motion picture industry to professional ruin over his risible, Red Scare paranoia.
Still, his impact on cinema is indisputable. For the best part of 30 years, John Wayne rubbed shoulders with Marlon Brando or James Stewart in stature, the face of Hollywood before the countercultural UCLA students got their hands on the film industry. Riding the latter wave despite being several years senior, Eastwood would channel some of the Wayne spirit of onscreen machismo, pouring such themes into his second career as a heavyweight director, albeit with some extra finesse and sophistication in hits like Unforgiven or Gran Torino.
There’s one heavyweight director that Wayne owes his career to and influences much of Eastwood’s filmmaking work. Starting his career in the silent era and standing as one of the key figures of the Hollywood Golden Age, John Ford’s visionary litany of acclaimed westerns, among a myriad of genre films and documentaries, would point Eastwood toward his knack for a quiet sense of intimate epic.
Eastwood spoke candidly to the Directors Guild of America in 2006 when considering the late auteur’s effect on him: “You look at a picture like The Grapes of Wrath and you realise that it’s a small film shot in a relatively short period of time, and yet it has a lot of scope.”
As much as Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese or Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, Ford and Wayne would stand as one of the most fruitful actor/director relationships in cinema, from 1939’s Stagecoach through to 1963’s Donovan’s Reef, 1956’s The Searchers sit in the pair’s filmography with mammoth Hollywood gravitas. Ford’s illustrations of an Americana populated by lone men besieged by nature and the law of the land, so sharply realised in the themes of frontier and honour, endeared him to a generation of later New Hollywood directors who would both honour and subvert Ford’s sensibilities.
Suffering from ill-health toward the end of his life and eventually dying in 1973, Ford could always rely on Wayne to sing his praises during a period when he struggled to have his pictures greenlit. “Up until the very last years of his life… Pappy [Ford] could have directed another picture and a damned good one. But they said Pappy was too old, Wayne lamented before picking up, “Hell, he was never too old. In Hollywood these days, they don’t stand behind a fella. They’d rather make a goddamned legend out of him and be done with him.”
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