“Unquestionably”: the one movie John Wayne called “the worst picture that was ever made”
The worst movie in cinema history doesn’t really exist, since it’s based entirely on how any one person feels. However, that didn’t stop John Wayne from naming the film that deserved the accolade.
The Conqueror is arguably the worst thing ‘The Duke’ ever starred in, and he came to regret it for another reason when the abysmal historical epic evolved into Hollywood’s deadliest-ever production, with the shooting location directly linked to the early deaths suffered by dozens of cast and crew members.
John Wayne playing Genghis Khan was a stupid idea from the get-go, and John Wayne playing a role that was originally written with Marlon Brando in mind is every bit as idiotic. It was pretty much doomed from the start, and while it’s an awful, awful thing to watch, he didn’t call it the worst thing he’d ever made.
On that particular front, there was only one answer, and it haunted the icon for the rest of his days. Under the old studio system, actors didn’t have much of a say in the projects they appeared in, which pushed a fresh-faced and unproven Marion Morrison into some right stinkers, one of which turned out so dismally that he contemplated turning his back on the business for good.
When you think of Wayne, you think of ‘The Duke’; the rugged, no-nonsense beacon of masculinity who became the walking embodiment of onscreen Americana. Sure, he was singing cowboy for a brief spell, but he was still a cowboy, which kept him tethered to the genre that he’d ultimately come to define.
He played football in college, so you can imagine him as an aspiring athlete. What nobody, including the man himself, could imagine him as was as the focal point of a sports-centric romantic comedy where love blossoms between a student and a socialite that culminates in a basketball game between the men’s and women’s teams, since he’d much prefer if 1931’s Girls Demand Excitement was scrubbed from history.
In only the second starring role of his career, which was released shortly after Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, Wayne had already effectively shit the bed as a marquee leading man. He’d gone zero-for-two, and he was so disheartened by how spectacularly his first pair of top-billed performances had panned out that he was ready to quit acting forever and return to a behind-the-scenes role as a prop man.
In the years that followed, he never softened his stance on director Seymour Felix’s caper. “It was unquestionably the worst picture that was ever made by the motion picture industry,” he declared, as biased as he was. A shite film is a shite film, whatever way anyone tries to spin it, but ‘The Duke’ did the opposite, and was adamant he’d made a shittier film than anyone had ever made, before or since.
Was it really that bad? Bad enough for it to haunt Wayne for the next six and a half decades as the low point of his entire filmography, which numbered well over 200 credits, and his lasting recollection of the experience neatly sums up how he felt and continued to feel about it: “God, did I hate making that picture.”
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