‘The Cowboys’: The John Wayne movie Bruce Dern is hated for
Long gone are the days when the great American movie western dominated the silver screen of Hollywood, where the likes of John Wayne, James Stewart, and Clint Eastwood bounced on horseback into a rural town to save it from its plight. Yet, the legacy of such characters and iconic movies rages on, with some movie lovers still annoyed by how Bruce Dern swaggered through one of Wayne’s starring roles.
The year was 1972, and Dern was preparing to play Long Hair in the Mark Rydell western The Cowboys, a light-hearted genre flick about a rancher who hires inexperienced boys as cowhands. Predictably, Wayne was playing the hero of the tale, Wil Andersen, while Dern took the role of the villain, the leader of a gang of cattle rustlers who tormented the protagonist and his new cowhands.
Working well alongside each other, Wayne insisted that Dern be horrible to him on set to make the younger co-stars believe that he was, indeed, a terrifying figure. Speaking to Cowboys and Indians, Dern recalled, “He gave me carte blanche to just treat him like a turd. So I was on him, talking back to him and stuff, for the few days I was there,” with the tactic being successful in creating the perfect atmosphere behind the scenes.
Later in the film, once Wayne’s character forms a strong bond with his young group of cowhands, Long Hair launches an attack on his camp, which results in a violent fistfight between the pair. Though Wayne’s Andersen wins the battle, as they walk away from one another, Long Hair shoots him multiple times in the arms, legs and torso, leaving him fatally wounded.
Even decades after the fictional incident, western fans across the globe remain fuming at Dern and his character. When asked whether he still encounters fans who are upset with him, the actor stated: “No question. But I knew that would happen. I knew on the day when I had to shoot him, when we did that scene, that he had never even had a bullet squib put on him before in his career”.
Continuing, he added that after the fateful scene was complete, Wayne had a few words of wisdom for him: “He told me ‘Oh, I want to remind you of one thing. When this picture comes out, and audiences see you kill me – they’re gonna hate you for this.’ I said, ‘Maybe. But at [UC] Berkeley, I’ll be a [bleeping] hero!’ He laughed at that”.
To glimpse one of the only times Wayne is killed on the cinema screen, check out the trailer for 1972’s The Cowboys below.
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