The movie scene John Wayne refused to shoot: “That isn’t funny”
Thanks to his standing in the industry and established screen persona, John Wayne was in a position to flat-out refuse any movies or specific scenes he didn’t think were in keeping with the image he’d worked so hard to cultivate.
‘The Duke’ didn’t give a damn what the critics thought about his output, but he was always thinking of audiences. When they paid to see one of his films, they were expecting to see the actor do what he did best, and he wasn’t of a mind to deviate from that template.
Even in the pictures that adhered rigidly to that tried-and-trusted template, Wayne would put his foot down and reject certain sequences if they didn’t convince him they were worth including in the final cut. Red River is one of his best and most famous flicks, but a comedy beat was excised at his request.
Helmed by Howard Hawks, the 1948 classic stars Wayne as Thomas Dunson, a cattle rancher who sets out for Missouri in the hopes of securing a better price for his wares. As the journey progresses, the headstrong veteran constantly clashes with Montgomery Clift’s protégé Matt Garth, causing tensions to rise.
Hawks wanted to include a scene that saw ‘The Duke’ getting his finger caught in between a saddle horn and a rope, mangling it to the point of necessary amputation. To pluck up the courage, Dunson would have gotten blind drunk and removed the offending digit, but Wayne simply wasn’t having it.
In conversation with the British Film Institute, the legendary filmmaker recalled the disgust Wayne showed when he floated the idea, even if it was being played for laughs. Unfortunately for the director, they had very different ideas over what constituted on-screen hilarity.
“I told John Wayne, Look, I’ve got an idea for a funny scene. You get your finger caught between a saddle horn and a rope, and it’s mangled, and they say, ‘Well, that finger isn’t going to be much use to you,'” he said. “And they get you drunk and they heat up an iron in the fire and sharpen a knife and cut off your finger.”
Instead of endorsing the suggestion, ‘The Duke’ instantly shut it down. “I said, ‘Oh it’s supposed to be funny,'” Hawks continued. “He said, ‘That isn’t funny’. I said, ‘If you’re not good enough then we won’t do it, I’ll do it with somebody else who’s a better actor.” It may have sounded like an empty threat, but that’s exactly what he did.
When he was helming The Big Sky with Kirk Douglas several years later, the finger mutilation scene was present and accounted for being performed by a different actor. It wasn’t funny for Wayne, but Hawks was determined to add the scene to his filmography in one way or another.
