“They seem to forget the one basic principle of our business”: The western movie John Wayne said went too far
Some things just sound like they go together: cooies and milk, cannon and ball, horse and hound. The words “western” and “John Wayne” are synonymous with one another.
Wayne is widely considered the greatest actor in the genre’s history, having maintained control of the style and story of many of the genre’s finest feature films. Having made 83 movies in and around the western style, it’s fair to say that the actor’s opinion on the subject is one worth paying attention to.
Rising to fame in the late 1920s, Wayne worked his way up from being a supporting actor to becoming the industry’s most celebrated leading man and an American icon. His career saw him earn two Oscar nominations and take home the prize in 1970 for his role in the western True Grit before his death in 1979. Throughout that period, he led the western genre from strength to strength, rising in prominence to become a hero enshrined in cinema history.
Considering his stature and fame, Wayne was often allowed to do just that, and, within said interviews and snippets, the actor was never shy about criticising the great and the good of the cinematic world. During one particularly infamous Playboy interview, Wayne took aim at some of the brightest movies of the moment, which he labelled as “perverted”, saying: “Every time they rate a picture, they let a little more go. Ratings are ridiculous to begin with.”
For Wayne, going to the movies was meant to be a tradition reserved for American families and as wholesome as the apple pie and ice cream they would eat after it. “Movies were once made for the whole family,” he explained. “Now, with the kind of junk the studios are cranking out, and the jacked-up prices they’re charging for the privilege of seeing it, the average family is staying home and watching television. I’m quite sure that within two or three years, Americans will be completely fed up with these perverted films.”
Wayne felt left behind by the ever-evolving cinema scene. As the world hurtled to a new way of making movies, the legends of the game like Wayne soon felt left in the dustbin of history. Movies now had to mean something, to challenge their audiences, and this didn’t really resonate with Wayne.
As well as showing his ultra-conservative viewpoint on Midnight Cowboy by denouncing the gay love shown on screen as an example of his issues, Wayne confirmed that “hair, sweaty bodies” would see the industry “fade out from its own vulgarity”. But it wasn’t just sex that upset Wayne. For an actor with an on-screen kill count of thousands, the idea of violence in the movies was a particular bugbear, too. Or, more importantly, the gore that came with said violence.
When questioned about The Wild Bunch, a notoriously gory western that also adds to Wayne’s claimed vulgarity, the actor was quick to put the movie down. “To me, The Wild Bunch was distasteful. It would have been a good picture without the gore,” explained Wayne of the Sam Peckinpah-directed movie. Set in the classic dust of western America, the film took a different look at the violence that swirled around the plains. Its focus on the brutality of the era and the always flaky moral code of the heroes who marauded through it, made it one of the anomalies of the genre.
However, for Wayne, such a unique view was unwelcome. “Pictures go too far when they use that kind of realism,” he explained, “When they have shots of blood spurting out and teeth flying, and when they throw liver out to make it look like people’s insides. The Wild Bunch was one of the first to go that far in realism, and the curious went to see it.”
Naturally, for an actor who had played such a sanitised hero for much of his career, the vision of Hollywood as an unfolding storybook meant that, for Wayne, there was an unnecessary tastelessness being brought to both the western genre and cinema at large. “They seem to forget the one basic principle of our business—illusion,” he told the publication.
For Waye, making movies wasn’t about showing the audience the real-life guts and blood of the stories; it was about entrancing them and whisking them away from their lives into something much more special. “We’re in the business of magic,” he explained, “I don’t think it hurts a child to see anything that has the illusion of violence in it. All our fairy tales have some kind of violence—the good knight riding to kill the dragon, etc. Why do we have to show the knight spreading the serpent’s guts all over the candy mountain?”
Wayne was certainly old-fashioned with his views on the world of cinema but his vision of an art form no longer bound by the idea of being a family-first industry was foresight that not all of his contemporaries possessed.
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