The one and only time John Wayne made an arthouse movie: “It was a tough spot to be in”
Certain actors spend their careers associated with a certain kind of movie, and it wouldn’t be an earth-shattering revelation to say that John Wayne was not the sort of star anyone would expect to show up in an art film. Apart from the one and only time that he did, which audiences unanimously rejected.
From the moment he finally gained some traction on the silver screen, ‘The Duke’ settled into the groove that would define him until his dying day. He was the rugged, manly, and no-nonsense hero of western and adventure films, and while there was plenty of romance to be found along the way, he never strayed too far outside of his signature, and ultimately iconic, wheelhouse.
Paying customers had become increasingly conditioned in what to expect from a Wayne-fronted picture, so whenever they didn’t get what they wanted, the box office results usually spoke for themselves. Not even a reunion with John Ford was enough to elevate The Long Voyage Home into profitability, and its lasting legacy is that it stands as a unique outlier in the leading man’s filmography.
You might be thinking, ‘There’s no way John Wayne ever made an arthouse movie’, which is a reasonable assumption. He covered plenty of genres during his decades of A-list domination, but it would be an understatement to say he didn’t have a vested interest in experimental cinema. If anything, he didn’t want it to change at all, with ‘The Duke’ furious that the ‘Golden Age’ didn’t carry on forever.
However, how else would you describe a movie that saw an independent producer, Walter Wagner, commission $50,000 in funding to have nine American painters come down to the set during production and create artworks based on The Long Voyage Home‘s most dramatic scenes which were then toured around the country as part of a travelling museum exhibit, other than an as an art film?
Even though it boasted the Wayne/Ford double-act on either side of the camera, how else would you describe a movie based on a quartet of one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill that enlisted innovative and ambitious cinematographer Gregg Toland, who employed the deep focus and high-contrast lighting techniques that would define his contributions to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane the following year, other than as a art film?
When are cinema’s biggest stars most likely to do an accent? If it’s not in Oscar bait, then it’s in an arthouse film. The Long Voyage Home was both, since it earned six Academy Award nominations, and ‘The Duke’ was understandably nervous about ditching his signature drawl to play a native Swede, Ole Olsen. “Now, there’s one line, ‘Ja, jag gå hem’, or something that Ford gave me. So I said, ‘OK. Christ, this is my mentor’. So I said it, ‘Ja, jag gå hem’, which I knew, my ear told me, did not sound right,” he recalled.
He asked for help, which Ford agreed to “if you want to be a goddamn actor,” dispatching the Danish actor, Osa Massen, to assist in mastering the brogue. Sometimes, though, he admitted that his line readings could be “embarrassingly bad,” leaving him convinced that the hardest thing about it was not to sound like a caricature or make it so pronounced that it was unintentionally hilarious to the audience.
“It was a tough spot to be in,” he acknowledged, and it was all for nothing when the sweeping drama failed to recoup its budget in ticket sales, losing almost a quarter of a million dollars for the studio, telling the executives what everybody else could have seen coming from a mile away; John Wayne and arthouse cinema were not a good match.
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