“An awful stinker”: the one and only John Wayne movie banned from British cinemas
He certainly had some controversial opinions, but John Wayne wasn’t a controversial actor, with his onscreen persona largely that of an inoffensive, patriotic, and often jingoistic American icon.
Obviously, some of his personal beliefs were questionable at best, and he was one of the highest-profile anti-communist crusaders in the 1950s, so he didn’t have any issues letting the world know what he thought about certain societal, social, or political issues, not that it did a thing to dent his star power.
Regardless of whether they were among the throngs who paid to see his pictures on the big screen or not, even the folks who despised ‘The Duke’ and everything he stood for couldn’t deny that he spent decades as one of the industry’s most bankable names, with his films reaching a global audience.
There are always outliers, and in his case, it was the only one of his credits that was denied a release in the United Kingdom. Wayne probably didn’t mind, since he would subsequently call it “an awful stinker,” and there’s also a delicious sense of irony in the movie bombing in the United States because of John Ford.
In November 1939, months after his star-making turn in Ford’s Stagecoach, he took top billing in director William A Seiter’s Allegheny Uprising. Playing the real-life frontiersman James Smith, Wayne becomes caught up in a mystery over the identity of who’s been supplying the Native American tribes with firearms.
His investigation leads him to a corrupt trader and an uncaring British military commander, with the former framing him for murder. One notable downside was that barely a soul in the States gave a shit about the movie, because a very similar film had been released a week previously, which was Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, with Henry Fonda in the lead role.
As was often the case, the film was given a new title ahead of its planned theatrical rollout in the United Kingdom, but The First Rebel didn’t even make it that far. After watching it, the local authorities decided that because it depicted its British characters as untrustworthy, cold, and malicious, it wouldn’t be released.
A little over two months had passed since Britain declared war on Germany, and with the nation already locked in combat with Nazi forces, the Ministry of Information decided that any movie that showcased the country’s military in a negative, disparaging, or unflattering light had no chance of being approved.
He had no idea at the time, but George Sanders was technically to blame, since his character, Captain Swanson, was set on a collision course with ‘The Duke’ when he imprisons the local populace to try and quell an American revolt against his stiff upper-lipped authority, cementing himself in history as the reason behind Wayne’s only UK ban from the big screen.
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