The one movie John Wayne broke his golden rule for: “He reluctantly agreed”
Having spent the bulk of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ as one of its most popular stars and biggest draws, John Wayne thought that he could easily weather an incoming storm without losing the cinematic superstardom he’d come to enjoy, only to discover that he was a man out of time.
‘The Duke’ was within his rights to stand his ground, though. Not only was he already in the twilight years of his career by the late 1960s, meaning that he was too long in the tooth to rip up the rulebook that had served him so well for so long, but since he was a living legend, he assumed that he wouldn’t have to.
However, nobody, not even him, could outrun evolution. Once the ‘New Hollywood’ era exploded into life, with a fresh wave of ambitious auteurs taking the medium in a bold new direction by pushing the boundaries their predecessors had left unexplored, Wayne was furious, if not apoplectic.
He abhorred what he saw as an increasing overreliance on sex and violence, fumed at the notion of homosexual representation becoming commonplace on the big screen, steamed at Clint Eastwood taking his beloved western down darker and more dangerous avenues, and was aghast at how the bloodless gunfights he’d been shooting for decades were reinvented as claret-soaked cacophonies.
The veteran was appalled by Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, a transformative milestone that upped the ante for onscreen violence, and he swore he wouldn’t be caught dead in a picture that treated human life with such wanton and blood-spattered disregard. Until he did, just one year later.
“I hadn’t directed a major film for a long time when Duke asked me if I’d like to do Big Jake,” George Sherman recalled. Principal photography kicked off in December 1970, 18 months after The Wild Bunch was released, and the filmmaker knew his film had to embrace the modern trends, but his leading man needed a little convincing.
“The biggest chance was the violence in films by 1970,” Sherman explained. “Duke disagreed with me on this, but I said we had to make the violence more realistic, because audiences had come to expect it. He reluctantly agreed.” He didn’t just agree; audiences were shocked by what they saw when Big Jake debuted in cinemas.
As most John Wayne movies tended to do, this one also ended with a climactic third-act shootout. This time, the actor abandoned the habit of a lifetime and acquiesced to his director’s demands to up the ante, leading many critics and viewers to deride the violent final showdown as so bloody that it bordered on the gratuitous.
The air was thick with hypocrisy, seeing as Wayne had openly decried how violent modern movies were becoming after a career of gunning down bad guys without a squib in sight, only to turn around, do the exact same thing himself in Big Jake, and in a picture that wasn’t a patch on The Wild Bunch.
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