“The greatest experience of my life”: the movie John Wayne enjoyed making the most
With well over 100 movies under his belt, John Wayne experienced almost everything that filmmaking had to offer, but one of his productions ended up sticking in his memory as the greatest.
That’s no easy feat considering ‘The Duke’ spent decades as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood and lent his name to countless cinematic classics, evolving from a leading man into a legend and a timeless icon of the moving image who crafted a persona that’s about as indelible as they come.
Always an outspoken personality, Wayne has celebrated and denigrated his own filmography in equal measure, praising some of his movies for pushing him to new lengths while lambasting others for failing to live up to their potential. He was never to mince his words, so calling one production the best time he’d ever had on set carried plenty of weight.
It wasn’t even one of his most famous pictures, either, coming towards the tail-end of his life. Thanks to various health issues and a general sense of dissatisfaction over where the business was heading, Wayne’s latter years were nowhere near as prolific as his glory days when he’d regularly appear in multiple films on an annual basis.
To put that into context, between the release of Big Jake in 1971 and his final big screen outing in The Shootist six years later, Wayne appeared in nine movies. In the six years immediately beforehand, he’d made 15, so it was clear he was slowing down in his twilight years and perhaps savouring each experience to a greater degree as a result.
Not many folks would go out on a limb and call Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys one of Wayne’s top-tier works, but the western carried plenty of weight beyond the confines of the silver screen. The symbolism may have been heavy-handed, but it was quite literally a passing of the torch story that saw ‘The Duke’ embrace his elder statesman status both on-camera and off to pass the torch to a new generation.
Playing an ageing rancher, the leading man’s Wil Andersen is preparing to head off on a huge cattle drive when his employees abandon him in favour of the gold rush. Enlisting a group of youngsters and training them how to handle the rigours of ranch life, they set off on an arduous journey beset by issues and Bruce Dern’s malevolent bandit.
Directed Rydell suggested that “the sense of passing on the mantle to a younger generation” was what drew Wayne to The Cowboys in the first place, which was underlined when the film became one of the very few times he was killed onscreen. The message of catharsis through violence and retribution wasn’t entirely welcomed, not that ‘The Duke’ ever cared what the critics had to say.
In Emanuel Levy’s biography, Prophet of the American Way of Life, Wayne admitted that “no actor in his right mind would try to match the antics of 11 kids onscreen.” But he didn’t have to. He was there to exude authority and gravitas, which he did, and the end result was a movie he called “the greatest experience of my life.”
