The movie scene that only existed to piss off John Wayne: “I decided it was payback time”
Even though it’s an industry with billions of dollars at stake, Hollywood can often be one of the pettiest places on the planet. Stars didn’t come much bigger than John Wayne when he was at the peak of his powers, but not everybody was a fan of his work as either a person or performer.
As popular as ‘The Duke’ was among audiences, his relentless crusade against the perceived communists infiltrating and tearing down the business he loved made him a few enemies. He hated everything they stood for, and things got so heated that a scene in a movie he had nothing to do with was precision-engineered and curated for the express purpose of getting under his skin.
If anyone was even remotely connected to those damned commies, then they were on Wayne’s shit list. As the screenwriter behind High Noon, which he called “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Carl Foreman was pretty high up on it. In fact, he was blacklisted as a result of his political ties, and he never forgot about ‘The Duke’ when he was finally allowed to be credited again.
Between 1954 and 1959, Foreman was either omitted from the credits or listed under a pseudonym before getting his name back out there as the scribe behind 1961’s The Guns of Navarone. Two years later, he made his one and only film as a director, which he saw as the perfect opportunity to stick it to his enemy.
“Wayne always boasted he’d run me out of Hollywood, and I decided it was payback time,” he told Michael Munn. “I made a film called The Victors, which was an antidote to all the flag-waving films that glorified war. The kind Wayne had made for years.”
That doesn’t sound too spiteful, but Foreman wasn’t done there. Like most people who worked in the industry, he was aware that Wayne and Frank Sinatra weren’t exactly best friends, and he also knew that ‘The Duke’ had tried to sabotage ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ from making The Execution of Private Slovik with a script from fellow blacklister Albert Maltz.
“I wrote into it a scene where American GIs are forced to watch the only American deserter to be shot in the Second World War,” Foreman explained. “The whole scene was played in the stark whiteness of the snow at Christmas, and on the soundtrack, over the whole scene, I put Sinatra singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’. That was my swipe at Wayne, and Sinatra loved it.”
Wayne did pick up on Foreman’s feature going out of its way to annoy him, even if it didn’t sound like he cared in the slightest. “The Victors was probably the most unsuccessful war film of the 1960s,” he declared. “Nobody went to see it.” Still, it was hilariously petty of its director to not only make a film that intentionally went against everything Wayne’s forays into the genre stood for, but to do it with a Sinatra track in the background just to piss him off.
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