The John Wayne role Clint Eastwood admits is “one of his brilliant performances”
There’s not even a debate over which two actors defined the Western more than any other, even if Clint Eastwood and John Wayne’s opinions of each other weren’t anywhere near as high as those of the genre’s many supporters.
The western genre defined itself on the broad shoulders of its lead actors. Perhaps more so than any other Hollywood style, a western relied so heavily on a hero that it was quick to recast anyone who found some success. It means actors like Wayne and Eastwood were quickly propelled up the ranks and scheduled to deliver countless contributions to the western catalogue.
But the two men operate as very different ends of the Hollywood spectrum. Eastwood was a dynamic performer, not content with staying within the stable of the genre. Meanwhile, aside from his pursuit of an Oscar, Wayne was very happy to sit among the titles of his most comfortable areas of performance. Not just professionally, but ideologically, the men were different.
‘The Duke’ became increasingly disgruntled with cinema’s ongoing evolution towards the end of his career, and with Eastwood leading the charge in reinventing the medium for a new generation through his seminal Dollars trilogy and revisionist takes like High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales, Wayne didn’t hold his erstwhile successor in the greatest of regard.
Why did John Wayne hate Clint Eastwood?
Eastwood even received a very angry letter from his counterpart illustrating that point, with Wayne taking the upstart to task for the way High Plains Drifter “wasn’t really about the people who pioneered the west,” leaving the grizzled star to accept “he wouldn’t understand what I was doing” by taking the genre down bold new storytelling avenues.
If ‘The Duke’ wasn’t a fan of any given actor, then he’d let them know it either directly or indirectly, but Eastwood never harboured any sort of outward animosity to John Ford’s most famous collaborator. If anything, he was known to openly celebrate Wayne’s titanic status in the annals of mainstream American cinema, and the actor-turned-filmmaker even compared an Academy Award-winning crime story he directed to one of Wayne’s best.
Reflecting on the subtleties of Mystic River to Film Comment, Eastwood finds it better to “provoke certain emotions and let the imagination take over” than spelling everything out directly to the audience. “If sometimes something is left unsaid, it’s much more picturesque in the person’s mind that’s drawn out for you, which could be disappointing because you wish it were something else,” which led him directly into The Searchers.
What is Clint Eastwood’s favourite John Wayne movie?
Wayne and Ford’s magnum opus, in one scene, the former’s Ethan Edwards returns to the family homestead after discovering the body of his niece Lucy. The body isn’t shown, but the character makes a point of instructing others to “never ask me what I saw.” For Eastwood, that was indicative of his point, as well as the complexities of the protagonist at large.
“That’s one of his brilliant performances, and brave, because he wasn’t afraid to play the flat-out racism,” the four-time Oscar winner explained. “And when you look at his eyes at that moment, you know it wasn’t something good that he saw, and you’d almost resent it if he started explaining it.”
It would have been a lot less impactful were The Searchers to linger on Lucy’s body to hammer home the brutality of her murder, but Wayne said more in a single look than any amount of graphic footage or exposition ever would. Those nuances inform both the character and the narrative using nothing more than the actor’s troubled expression, which is just one of many reasons why it’s his finest performance.
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