What was John Wayne’s final movie role?
In 1976, John Wayne’s final movie role was released. It came in an elegiac western where “The Duke” played a character facing his own mortality. He did this by confronting the violence of his past while also seeking redemption in his present. In many ways, it can function nicely as a companion piece to Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s final western, which also found an ageing cowboy reckoning with the violent life he lived as an outlaw.
Interestingly, Eastwood was actually offered the lead role, which Wayne would eventually take in the film. The producers also contacted other stars, including Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Charles Bronson, and George C Scott, but they said no. Indeed, it almost seemed fated that this was Wayne’s movie, despite all the reasons there were to avoid casting him.
You see, when it was announced that producer Mike Frankovich had optioned the source novel by Glendon Swarthout, Wayne immediately registered his interest. In this novel, he saw echoes of one of his past roles that got away. He had turned down the part of Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter because he disliked Harry Cohn, the president of Columbia, who was producing the film. He loved the role, though, and it likely hurt him to see Gregory Peck play it in the 1950 film.
However, by the mid-’70s, Wayne’s health had been failing for years, and producers got cold feet about casting him. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer in 1964, and it led to surgery to remove his left lung and several of his ribs. The film was to be shot in Carson City, Nevada, which lies at an altitude of 4,600 feet. Naturally, people worried this would compromise Wayne’s already limited breathing capacity – and this would come to pass when the powers that be finally relented and cast Wayne. However, despite having a tough time with breathing and mobility, coupled with a bout of influenza, which caused the production to be shut down for a week, Wayne was able to soldier through and complete the film.
The film’s director was Don Siegel, arguably best known for working with Eastwood on films like Dirty Harry and Escape From Alcatraz. There were rumours that Wayne exerted a lot of creative control over the film and would constantly demand changes to the script, which aggravated Siegel. However, in John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, Siegel set the record straight by saying, “He had plenty of his own ideas. Some I liked, which gave me inspirations, and some I didn’t like. But we didn’t fight over any of it. We liked each other and respected each other.”
So, what was John Wayne’s final movie role?
Wayne’s final movie was, of course, The Shootist, and the character he played was John Bernard “JB” Books, a former sheriff with more than 30 bodies to his name.
The movie co-starred Lauren Bacall as Bond Rogers, the caretaker of a home the cancer-ridden gunfighter seeks shelter in, and a young Ron Howard as Gillom, her son who has grown up without a father. Naturally, Books and Rogers become romantic, and he sees the potential to live his latter years as part of a family. Unfortunately, he has become famous thanks to a book published about his gunfighter exploits, attracting several outlaws keen to make their own names by killing the legendary “shootist.”
The Shootist is unique among Wayne films for a few reasons. For one, he gives a much more layered, sensitive performance than most of his tough-guy roles. In addition, because the film came out in the ’76, at the height of the ‘New Hollywood’ boom, Siegel was able to present the violence in a much more brutal, realistic fashion than in the majority of Wayne’s older westerns.
Mostly, though, the film can’t help having an overall tone of poignancy, given that Wayne was playing a character dying of cancer while dying of cancer in real life. Indeed, when Siegel opens the film with flashbacks to Books’ previous adventures, but the footage is from old Wayne films, it would take a man of stone not to feel a pang of emotion.
In many ways, The Shootist is Wayne’s love letter to cinema, and by ending his career with a brilliant character like Books, he went out on a high.
