The movie that “disgusted” John Wayne simply by existing: “He gave me such a bollocking”
Whether it was down to his staunch defence of cinema or his reputation for being a bit of a cantankerous arse, John Wayne was known to weigh in, mainly to criticise, on a number of movies he had nothing to do with.
He hated Gary Cooper’s seminal High Noon for its alleged communist undertones that he denigrated the film any time he had the chance, and he definitely didn’t take it so personally that he and Howard Hawks made basically the exact same picture in response when they joined forces for Rio Bravo.
‘The Duke’ slammed Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter for taking his beloved western down a much darker alley than he ever wanted to see it go, trashed Midnight Cowboy for spotlighting gay culture, criticised the moral bankruptcy of All the King’s Men, and wasted an awful lot of breath voicing his objections to features that would be made whether he liked them or not.
One of the biggest issues Wayne faced during the twilight years of his career was that he wanted things to stay exactly the way they’d been during his ‘Golden Age’ pomp, and that would never happen with ‘New Hollywood’ and the movie brats coming over the horizon. One of them even offered him a job, only for the most patriotic man in Tinseltown to unload with both barrels in response.
Fresh from the industry-shaking success of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg made the first major misstep of his career when he helmed 1941. With the benefit of hindsight, Wayne was probably right to turn him down when the filmmaker admitted he’d dropped the ball, but he was still offended by way of the fact that it existed at all.
“John Wayne was a very intelligent man, in the sense that he knew the difference between melodrama and real life,” Spielberg wrote in the foreword to C. McGivern’s John Wayne: A Giant Shadow. “He understood. And I loved him. He was a great guy. He didn’t want me to make 1941. He said me, ‘You’re making a mockery of a very serious time… and I read your script… it’s attempting to be a comedy… I for one didn’t laugh’. He gave me such a bollocking about it.”
Wayne had fallen out with people for less, but Spielberg maintained that “we stayed friends, although he was just disgusted that I would make what he thought was a very anti-American picture.” The director did insist that “he would have loved Saving Private Ryan,” which is probably accurate since it was made with the best of intentions and earned the approval of people who’d actually served, which was a bugbear that haunted ‘The Duke’ for decades.
There aren’t many people who do like 1941, mostly because it’s not very good, and it remains one of Spielberg’s weakest efforts. That said, Wayne abhorred the very notion from the second he heard about it, so the chances are pretty high that he never got around to watching the finished film.
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