John Wayne despised onscreen violence going “too far” until he did it himself
Like many Hollywood heroes before and after him, John Wayne racked up a considerable onscreen body count as a man of action. His movies regularly saw him leave a trail of bodies in his wake, and while his filmography featured plenty of death, it was rarely violent.
The ‘Golden Age’ was hardly overflowing with films where blood squibs were being detonated with grisly and gratuitous abandon, leaving ‘The Duke’ as a relatively bloodless figure in an age where the good guys always saved the day and more often than not got the girl without causing controversy among audiences or censors.
However, when the ‘New Hollywood’ movement began to rear its head, Wayne increasingly began to feel like a man out of time. He despised what the business he’d dedicated his life to was becoming, with a new generation of auteurs ratcheting up the sex, sensuality, and taboo-busting storylines to go along with lashings of gruesome death, despair, and gore.
The star repeatedly voiced those concerns in public, with Sam Peckinpah’s seminal The Wild Bunch becoming a particular bone of contention. The western was indeed controversial and violent, but it also emerged on the other side as one of the most influential pictures of its era when it opened the doors for a more authentic sense of carnage to take centre stage on the silver screen.
Noticing that change was afoot, ‘The Duke’ willingly sacrificed his own moral convictions to headline Big Jake, released just two years after The Wild Bunch. A standard Wayne vehicle in storytelling terms, the title character sets out with his sons to deliver the ransom fee demanded for his kidnapped grandchild, albeit with no intention of handing the money over peacefully.
As Gene Siskel pointed out at the time, “The most obvious excess, and this is unusual for a John Wayne film, is violence,” with The Duke happy to disregard his distaste for pushing the envelope in favour of making a movie that was by far the most violent he’d ever made at the time.
There’s impalement by pitchfork, attack by machete, and an opening massacre at the hero’s ranch that leaves plenty of bloodstained corpses lying around. Wayne had gunned down plenty of adversaries during a storied career, but it was never as viciously and unrelentingly realised as it was in Big Jake.
Through a modern lens, it’s all fairly tame. On the other hand, audiences weren’t accustomed to ‘The Duke’ dishing out such ruthless retribution, which made him something of a hypocrite, considering he criticised the business for going “too far when they use that kind of realism when they have shots of blood spurting out and teeth flying, and when they throw liver out to make it look like people’s insides.”
He’d specifically singled out The Wild Bunch as the example, but in no time at all, he was doing much the same in Big Jake, throwing stones in a glass house entirely of his own making.
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