Going out in a blaze of glory: What John Wayne’s final shot says about his career
Art and life regularly intersect in cinema, and while he always harboured dreams of making at least one more feature, The Shootist conspired to offer the near-perfect swansong for John Wayne to bow out of silver screen stardom.
There were elegiac undertones to the production from the very beginning, and not just because Wayne played an ageing gunslinger diagnosed with terminal cancer. More than a decade before the release of Don Siegel’s 1976 western, ‘The Duke’ had his left lung and two ribs removed after battling the disease, although it would eventually return much more aggressively.
While he wasn’t terminally ill during the shoot and the lung cancer that ultimately killed him wouldn’t be diagnosed until early 1979 – just six months before his passing – the way The Shootist was constructed and executed gives off the impression Wayne knew time was not on his side.
As well as having script approval, he was also instrumental in the casting process. Lauren Bacall, Richard Boone, and John Carradine were all cast at his behest, while James Stewart hadn’t appeared in a film for five years before taking on the role of Doc Hostetler. Having worked together on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and How the West Was Won in addition to maintaining a close friendship, Stewart only agreed to end his self-imposed exile as a favour to Wayne.
Wielding his creative influence, ‘The Duke’ instructed Siegel that, unlike the ending of Glendon Swarthout’s source novel, the conclusion of the movie would not end with his protagonist J.B. Books shooting a man in the back, declaring it “unthinkable for my image”. However, when Brooks meets his own demise in the final scene, that’s exactly how he goes out.
The Shootist at large serves as an apt exclamation point on not just Wayne’s career but his standing in Hollywood history. Beyond the similarities of the illness shared by performer and part, Books may as well have been a facsimile of where ‘The Duke’ found himself at the time professionally.
Books is forced to contend with a modern world he’s both ill-equipped for and uninterested in navigating, holding out as one of the Old West’s last gunslingers in the advent of the technological age. For Wayne, he’d been railing against the modernity of Hollywood, believing the influx of auteur-driven stories and boundary-pushing topics was destroying the artform, something he couldn’t abide.
When the time comes for Books to bow out in The Shootist, he opts to send himself out in a blaze of glory. Getting drawn into a gunfight at a saloon, he dispatches three would-be assailants while taking a bullet to the arm, before the establishment’s bartender guns him down with a shotgun shell to the back right as he prepares to make his exit.
‘The Duke’ knew his time as an actor, a relevant presence in the industry, and even existence on the mortal plane was in short supply, so not only did he allow The Shootist to kill him on-screen in what was a very rare occurrence, but his final contribution to cinema as a whole has his lifeless body being covered in a coat by a much younger man, in this case, Ron Howard’s Gillom Rogers.
It’s a reflective, retrospective look at Wayne’s life and legacy, enhanced by The Shootist using footage from Wayne’s previous westerns in its opening act to underline Books’ – and by extension his – towering mythology. As an actor, he was in serious danger of being left behind by the advancement of his chosen arena, something that also applies to Books at the turn of the 20th century.
By the time the credits roll, the hero of The Shootist is dead, but their mystique maintains intact. Fast forward three years, and Wayne was dead, too, but his legacy lives on to this day.
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