When ‘The Duke’ crossed the pond: the only movie John Wayne made in the UK
The epitome of on-screen Americana, John Wayne lived and breathed the stars and stripes just as much in front of the camera as he did away from it, with jingoism and patriotism equally integral to his mythology both as an actor and a person.
When he saw something he believed to be un-American he wasn’t shy in letting it be known, and for better or worse that sentiment extended to movies he found insulting to the country and the people who made it what it was, and those he viewed as being complicit in the Communist invasion ‘The Duke’ felt was polluting the industry he cherished so dearly.
Basically, movie stars didn’t come much more American than Wayne, right down to the dark side of that sentiment, and that was reflected in his filmography. He made well over 150 features in a career that stretched from his uncredited debut in the mid-1920s to his elegiac swansong in The Shootist half a century later, and only once did he appear in a British film.
When he did, it came across as being a reactionary move that may well have been inspired by his burgeoning feud with a certain Clint Eastwood. ‘The Duke’ had famously been offered the role of ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan and reportedly turned it down because he didn’t want the sloppy seconds of his arch-nemesis Frank Sinatra, something he later admitted to be a mistake on his part.
To rectify that misstep, Wayne signed on to play the title character in 1975 action thriller Brannigan. The veteran Chicago detective is dispatched to London in order to extradite an American criminal, but when his charge is kidnapped, the outsider goes on a gun-toting rampage through the city that leaves a trail of destruction and blatant disregard for local customs in its wake.
Although there are certain scenes that were shot in the ‘Windy City’, the majority of Brannigan was filmed on location in ‘The Big Smoke’, which saw it gain a unique place in cinema history as the one and only time in Wayne’s entire career that he crossed the pond for the purpose of shooting a movie.
Thanks to Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, the hard-edged cops-and-criminals thriller had exploded in popularity and prolificacy, but Brannigan carried the extra novelty of having the Western operating on the other side of the Atlantic. That selling point was reflected in the wonderfully cheesy tagline splashed across the trailer that states ‘The Duke’s in London! God save the Queen’, but it was far from a rousing success.
It’s attained cult classic status over the years, though, and ultimately stood as one of Wayne’s final credits. He’d only make True Grit sequel Rooster Cogburn and the aforementioned The Shootist before his death in 1979, with Brannigan becoming a curious footnote by way of its status as a singularly unique excursion.
