Clint Eastwood and John Wayne were from very different generations, but they were two sides of the same coin. They both helped define and mythologise a certain type of rugged individualism and American masculinity and did so through the specific confines and tropes of the western genre. However, the philosophies of their characters could hardly have been more different.
Wayne was built in the classic mould of Old Hollywood. His characters always had integrity, no matter the situation, and he never died without honour. He typified conservative American values, and his morality was never questionable on-screen. Eastwood rose to fame as a poster child of New Hollywood. His characters were cyphers. Violent, unpredictable, and morally ambiguous, they rarely went out of their way to protect the innocent or stand for what was right until the very last moment.
The world of John Wayne movies was a clear binary between good and evil, while the world of Clint Eastwood movies was made up of murky ethics, lawlessness, and corruption on every level. There was no romance to Eastwood westerns. The West that they depicted was a dark cesspit of amorality and indiscriminate violence.
Wayne allegedly deplored the younger actor’s influence on the genre. Although it has never been verified, there are rumours that he sent Eastwood a letter after the release of High Plains Drifter, a spectacularly pessimistic and violent revisionist western, to scold him for portraying the Old West – and by extension the entire American project – in such a negative light.
It’s hardly surprising that there is little crossover between the two men in the movies. The characters, periods, and plots are all different. However, there was one Eastwood film that was written as a direct response to a Wayne classic. According to its screenwriter, the movie was made to right the wrongs of the previous version.
David Webb Peoples penned several iconic scripts over the years, including Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys. But the one he will probably be remembered for most is 1992’s Unforgiven, a ‘Best Picture’ winner directed by and starring Eastwood as an ageing gunslinger who agrees to return for one last job.
According to Peoples, he was inspired to write the script because of the perceived watering-down of Glendon Swarthout’s book The Shootist in the 1976 Wayne western of the same name. In the film, Wayne plays an ageing gunslinger who, knowing that he is about to die, is determined to do so with dignity. It was his final performance, and it’s a moving one. But according to Peoples, it wasn’t nearly as gritty as the source material.
“It’s very important to know that Glendon’s novel was a very dark story,” the screenwriter said in an interview with Closely Observed Frames in 2024. “His son wrote the screenplay and it was a nice movie, but it lacked all the guts, harshness and darkness that the novel had… I’d never seen a movie where the hero, who is a gunfighter, is afraid to die… Unforgiven pretty much ended up on the screen exactly as I had written it in 1976. That was a long time before it was bought or made.”
Eastwood’s film is certainly a far cry from Wayne’s, but the plot parallels are undeniable when you spell them out. Unforgiven went on to earn nine Oscar nominations, including for Peoples’s script, which was put in the ‘Original Screenplay’ category rather than the ‘Adapted Screenplay’ one.