The 1961 scene that turned John Wayne against a “piece of shit” director: “If he wants to commit suicide, that’s up to him”
Working with the same director on multiple movies was nothing new for John Wayne, but the second time didn’t mark the charm in the early 1960s, with one scene the catalyst for simmering tension between the star and his director.
Generally speaking, as an actor, Wayne was fairly easy to please. If a director didn’t get in his way, didn’t try to throw their weight around to intimidate or overrule him, and let him do what he did best, he wouldn’t have any problems. However, threatening to kill his prized cattle? That’s a different story.
The pair were already familiar with each other, having previously partnered on 1953’s Trouble Along the Way, but things weren’t quite as cordial when ‘The Duke’ and Michael Curtiz found themselves back together for 1961’s The Comancheros, with a potentially dangerous sequence their breaking point.
In the film, the leading man plays a veteran Texas Ranger forced to form an alliance with the gambler in his custody when the titular gang of outlaws becomes their shared enemy. Wayne had supplied his own cattle for the production, and according to Tom Mankiewicz, who’d already irritated the western icon by wearing a JFK badge on set, Curtiz had an idea for a stampede scene.
He told the second-unit director, Cliff Lyons, that he wanted the cattle, more than two dozen of which belonged to Wayne, to run over a five-foot drop and then scramble up onto the other side for safety. When Lyons told him that some of the animals would surely break their legs, he didn’t give a shit.
“Don’t argue with me, just do it!” Curtiz told him, with Mankiewicz asking if Lyons was really going to move forward and run the risk of injuring, maiming, or killing some of Wayne’s livestock when he wasn’t around. “Fuck it,” came the reply. “Curtiz is the director. If he wants to commit suicide, that’s up to him.”
Mankiewicz then asked the director if he should maybe run it past ‘The Duke’ first, to which he responded by firing a blank from a prop gun in the former’s vicinity, and then firing him from the picture. When he was packing his bags and preparing to head home, he received a phone call from The Comancheros‘ lead.
“I heard what you did out there, thank you,” Wayne told him. “I’m going out to see what that Hungarian piece of shit is doing with my cattle.”
After hearing that he’d been fired, ‘The Duke’ told Mankiewicz not to worry about Curtiz: “Hell, by the time I’m through with him, he won’t even remember that. See you tomorrow.”
Sure enough, Mankiewicz reported to the set the next day, and the filmmaker who’d only just fired him didn’t say a word. Curtiz, who was suffering from terminal cancer and died five months after The Comancheros was released, often found himself too ill to direct, and Wayne was more than happy to step in and pick up the slack, with Mankiewicz estimating that after the cattle incident, ‘The Duke’ ended up helming over half of the picture, although he was kind enough to go uncredited for his efforts.
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