The one movie John Wayne knew “wasn’t good enough” from the start: “In the end, it was a fiasco”
Cinema history is awash with movies that sounded like good ideas in theory, but were let down by the execution. John Wayne liked one story so much that he agreed to make it without a completed script, which came back to bite him in the arse when the finished film was completely forgettable.
It’s never a good idea to start shooting a picture without a finalised screenplay, and there are more than enough examples to indicate why. And yet, since he was so captivated by the concept, ‘The Duke’ barrelled ahead, weathered several obstacles along the way, and didn’t have much to show for it in the end.
Hot on the heels of Jet Pilot, a film so dismal that the man himself considered it among the very worst he’d ever made, Wayne needed to rebound and remind audiences why he was the biggest star in the business. To do so, he turned to a director who’d become one of his most trusted lieutenants, Henry Hathaway.
They’d worked together before on 1941’s The Shepherd of the Hills, but this was their first collaboration in a decade and a half. The pair would make another six movies together, but their reunion didn’t get off to the greatest of starts, and things continued to stumble from there.
“The film was a co-production between Batjac, United Artists, and an Italian company called Dear Films,” Hathaway explained. “It was a really complicated setup with too many fingers in the pie. We had a screenplay by Ben Hecht which really wasn’t good enough, so we had another writer, Robert Presnell Jr, have a go.”
When he pitched ‘The Duke’ the project, which finds a grizzled American partnering up with a British man to uncover hidden treasure alongside a mysterious bombshell, the filmmaker recalled that “we didn’t have a script, but he loved the idea, which is why he wanted Batjac involved.” When they received the first draft, though, “We knew it wasn’t good enough.”
Wayne pushed for Sophia Loren as his love interest, “so we’d have plenty of sex appeal,” with the “good but uninteresting” Rossano Brazzi filling the third leading role. Hathaway fancied a straightforward adventure story, but the producer and leading man kept insisting on more and more bells and whistles, leaving the filmmaker to think that “it all got too messy.”
“We started filming in January in a village called Ghadames, which was smack in the middle of the Sahara. We shot there and in the desert for two months, and then we moved to Cinecitta Studios in Rome for 12 weeks,” Hathaway continued. “And all the time we were trying to rewrite the screenplay to make it work. It was a relief to get to the studio in Italy. But in the end, it was just a fiasco.”
Legend of the Lost was released in December 1957, a mere two months after Jet Pilot, and it didn’t set the world on fire. It’s easy to notice that the cameras started rolling without a finished script, Wayne and Loren’s total lack of chemistry doesn’t help matters, and the film feels too excessive and self-indulgent for its own good, but that’s what happens when your A-lister is taken more by an idea than an undertaking.
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