“There must have been a curse”: the 1930 John Wayne movie that became the “worst experience ever”
Several movies are in with a shout at being named as the most cursed production in Hollywood history, and one of them does indeed star John Wayne. That said, based on the testimony of those involved, he was unlucky enough to have a second contender.
Usually, it’s horror movies that earn the ‘cursed’ tag. The Exorcist, The Omen, and Poltergeist were all plagued by incidents, mishaps, unexplainable goings-on, and tragedy, which enhanced their ominous legend. For ‘The Duke’, things were much more straightforward.
Playing Genghis Khan was a stupid idea from the beginning, and it’s doubtful that The Conqueror would even be spoken about today, were it not for the fact that so many of its cast and crew members were either diagnosed with or died from cancer, which was blamed on shooting so close to a nuclear testing site.
More than 20 years previously, though, another one of Wayne’s pictures suffered from a never-ending stream of bad luck. From a career standpoint, 1930’s The Big Trail was supposed to be a big deal. It was the actor’s second time being credited onscreen, his first time being credited as John Wayne, and the first time he’d taken top billing on anything, but it was far from the star-maker it was meant to be.
The film flopped at the box office and set him back by years, and it wouldn’t be until the release of John Ford’s Stagecoach, almost a decade later, that ‘The Duke’ was finally a hot commodity. It should have been his big-screen breakthrough, but in the end, the western almost ruined him completely.
Still, that barely scratched the surface. Suddenly, several cast and crew members, most notably Tyrone Power Sr, started dropping dead like flies, which convinced director Raoul Walsh that something supernatural was afoot. “There must have been a curse on The Big Trail,” he intoned. “Most of that New York crowd, the actors, were dead, heart attacks, within a year, two years.”
The bad juju didn’t end there, either, with the bankruptcy of 20th Century Fox and Fox Theatres co-founder, William Fox, torpedoing the movie’s chances of success. “The worst thing that happened was William Fox went bust,” Walsh explained, and as a result, there were barely any cinemas that could screen The Big Trail in 35mm, cutting its box office prospects off at the knees.
“Damn shame,” the filmmaker sighed. “It was a beautiful picture, and Wayne did a fine job.” Having nuked its leading man’s immediate future, shuffled several names off their mortal coil, and then having its earning power dampened by its preferred choice of theatre chain hitting the skids, it was understandable that Walsh didn’t look back on The Big Trail with too much fondness.
“Oh, I tell you, it was the worst experience ever,” the director concluded. “And I don’t know how we ever got it in the can.” It wasn’t remembered too fondly by anyone involved, not least of all the ones who died as a result of Walsh’s hypothesis that it was cursed, but after some trial and error, ‘The Duke’ made it to the top eventually.
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