The John Wayne movie that Martin Scorsese called “remarkable”
Even though he was incredibly protective of his persona to the point he wouldn’t even consider playing a character remotely against type, John Wayne didn’t hold such a high opinion of himself that he believed his filmography to be flawless.
That being said, ‘The Duke’ didn’t care what the critics had to say when his job wasn’t to win rapturous acclaim but to entertain audiences the world over. That’s exactly what he did, and he managed it by fine-tuning the larger-than-life character paying customers wanted to see.
Wayne turned down a number of high-profile roles in films that would go on to become classics because they weren’t in line with either what he wanted to do or what he thought his fans wanted to see him doing. However, he was critical of many movies that he did star in, even if Martin Scorsese would disagree on one particular count.
1948’s Wake of the Red Witch starred John Ford’s favourite collaborator as the steward of the titular vessel, which ends up stranded on a remote island when he sabotages his own ship out of spite and revenge. It’s definitely not one of Wayne’s best, and he even referred to it as a “rather dull” undertaking.
The Edward Ludwig-directed adventure would have been released in cinema when Scorsese was only six years old, so the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia could be at least partially responsible for his adoration of a movie its own leading man wasn’t all that impressed with.
“I became aware of John Wayne as an actor, and I think the key films really were Wake of the Red Witch, which is a remarkable movie with a wonderful flashback structure,” he said to American Masters. “But that was John Wayne, the movie star. We were kids, we didn’t know! We thought actors were up there and the people were up there on the screen.”
‘The Duke’ may have disagreed, and while he was a child at the time, the next eight decades have firmly set Scorsese out as a man who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the best of cinema. His fondness for the movie was hardly fleeting, either, with legendary auteur’s Film Foundation partnering up with Paramount to restore and curate a programme of 30 movies from the Republic Pictures back catalogue in 2018, one of which was Wake of the Red Witch.
More than 60 years after it played an important part in his initial cinematic awakening as a youngster, Scorsese’s fondness hadn’t dissipated. Wayne might be a legend of the silver screen, but the veteran has probably forgotten more about filmmaking than ‘The Duke’ ever knew, so it wouldn’t be an egregious offence to side with him on this one.
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