John Wayne’s “furious” response to the movie that almost killed his co-star: “It was like working in hell”
Even the people John Wayne saw as his most trusted collaborators weren’t immune from the actor’s wrath when his temper got the better of him, especially when they greeted a near-death incident on set with nothing more than apathy.
‘The Duke’ was no stranger to staring mortality in the face while shooting a movie, with the Hollywood icon having been through the wars several times and barely emerged on the other side with his life intact, although there are plenty of reasons to believe that The Conqueror finished the job.
It goes without saying that film sets weren’t quite as rigorous in their health and safety measures during Wayne’s heyday as they are now, and the almost-fatal accident didn’t even occur on the studio’s time. However, what pushed him over the edge was the reaction of someone he considered a close friend.
Henry Hathaway was comfortably the legend’s second-favourite filmmaker to work with, behind only John Ford, but 1957’s Legend of the Lost left ‘The Duke’ ready to throw hands with Henry Hathaway. While an adventure film was nothing out of the ordinary for a leading man who loved playing to type, the picture was notable for featuring two heavyweights of international cinema alongside the Hollywood staple.
Italian A-listers Sophia Loren and Rossano Brazzi took second and third billing behind Wayne in the film, and the latter admitted to Michael Munn that he regretted agreeing to shoot it in Libya. “I kept asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this?'” he said. “It was like working in hell. The village we were living in at the start of production was unbelievably primitive. I didn’t know such places could exist in this century.”
It was boiling hot during the day and freezing cold at night, with Loren the only cast member with a heater installed in their accommodation. As it turned out, those home comforts were almost the death of her, with Brazzi explaining that she nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning in her sleep after the heater sucked all of the oxygen out of the room.
“She was being asphyxiated until one night she nearly suffocated to death,” he recalled. “It was only because she fell out of bed that she was able to rouse herself. She said that by the time she had crawled to the door, struggling for breath, she was almost comatose.”
Brazzi discovered her lying in the corridor on the verge of unconsciousness, and after being given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by a doctor, the physician informed Loren that she would have died had he not found her. When ‘The Duke’ discovered what had happened, Hathaway’s complete lack of apathy and empathy almost made him explode.
“When John Wayne found out, he was furious, but he didn’t know who to be angry at,” Brazzi said. “He felt terrible that Sophia had nearly died, and it didn’t help that Henry Hathaway’s biggest concern was how they’d replace her if she’d died. I could see that Wayne would have liked to have punched his director, but he held his temper and calmed down.”
Wayne undersold things when pressed for his thoughts on Legend of the Lost. Sure, he confessed that “it was a long, hard shoot and after all that, it wasn’t much of a picture,” but he didn’t allude to being ready to sock Hathaway in the jaw for prioritising his film over Loren’s health after she was left knocking on death’s door.
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