The movie John Wayne only made to spite Clint Eastwood: “I thought I could be Dirty Duke”
For decades, John Wayne had been the undisputed top dog and biggest star of the western genre, with every pretender to the throne failing to dislodge ‘The Duke’ from his position.
However, things began to change in the mid-1960s when a gruff, grizzled, and undeniably charismatic actor named Clint Eastwood arrived on the scene. Eastwood headlined Sergio Leone’s classic Dollars trilogy before returning to the dusty plains several times over in the years to come in films like Hang ‘Em High and High Plains Drifter.
Wayne was already growing disillusioned with where Hollywood was heading by that point in his career, having refused to alter his approach in the inescapable advance of modernity. The industry and the movies it was producing were becoming darker, grittier, more realistic, and more intent to push boundaries and reinvent the wheel, and it was something he simply couldn’t abide by.
There was a rivalry between Wayne and Eastwood, which was inevitable when they were battling for supremacy as two superstars synonymous with the same genre. However, it was away from the Old West where their paths came closest to crossing after ‘The Duke’ knocked back the chance to headline Dirty Harry.
He was hardly the only one, with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Mitchum also turning down the title role, but watching Eastwood turn Harry Callahan into an instant cinematic icon in a box office success and cultural touchstone that helped usher in the era of the antiheroic cop thriller evidently made a bigger impact on Wayne than the rest.
Having watched Eastwood craft one of his most popular characters in a part he’d declined to play, Wayne opted to try and create one of his own. Less than two years after Dirty Harry had hit cinemas, ‘The Duke’ began shooting McQ, and by his own admission, it wasn’t a coincidence that he played a hard-edged police officer with revenge on his mind after stumbling upon a wide-ranging conspiracy.
“I thought I could be Dirty Duke,” he told Michael Munn. “After all, I chose to do it because I turned down Dirty Harry. I turned it down for what seemed to be to be three very good reasons.” One of them was that he didn’t like the fact he’d been “offered Sinatra’s rejections,” the second was that he “thought Harry was a rogue cop,” and the third was that he was “too busy making other pictures.”
Wayne confessed that his decision to knock back Dirty Harry was due to his “narrow-mindedness because when I saw the picture, I realised that Harry was the kind of part I’d often played enough.” He saw Eastwood reap the rewards, and with a mixture of regret and jealousy, Wayne opted to try and create his own version of Don Siegel’s action-packed adventure.
Unfortunately for ‘The Duke’, things didn’t go as planned. McQ received a muted response from critics and audiences, made nowhere near as much money at the box office, and was called out for being a watered-down and blatant knock-off of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. According to the leading man, that’s exactly what it was supposed to be and the only reason it existed.
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