Believe it or not, there was a time when The Duke was just plain old John Wayne, a struggling actor who was trying to make it. He was, like every fledgling actor, just a person trying to get themselves a job. They might have their preferences, but a check is a check. Wayne’s status as a Western icon was not yet cemented, and he had yet to become a household name. His cinematic identity was more malleable because nobody really knew who he was, and the studios hadn’t really decided on it yet anyway. This is where things get a little strange. Hot off the heels of The Big Trail, his first big feature, John Wayne and Marguerite Churchill reunited for the 1931 romantic comedy Girls Demand Excitement. The film is surprisingly out of character for Wayne — in fact, he hated the film so much, it almost made him quit acting.
What Is ‘Girls Demand Excitement’ About?
Back in 1931, movie making was the business of studios. They controlled pretty much everything from production to distribution. Actors were more or less employees of whatever studio they signed up with, and those very same studios took an active part in shaping the public image of their actors. That process would be one of trial and error and had a lot to do with what the audience thought. If an actor sold more tickets for playing a badass cowboy than a good-looking football star, then a badass cowboy is what he would be. In the case of John Wayne’s Western movie career, this is precisely the case. Despite him playing a cowboy in The Big Trail, the studio wasn’t yet sure if this would be the right avenue for the young, dashing Wayne. Thinking that perhaps he could sell more tickets as a heartthrob, they cast him in a romantic comedy, according to Slash Film.
In Girls Demand Excitement, John Wayne plays the clean-cut basketball star, Peter Brooks. He is handsome and solid and whip-crack smart. He is, in almost every way, the ideal American man. There’s just one little problem with him: he doesn’t like the fact that girls are allowed to attend college. Peter Brooks believes that girls have no place within the educational system, and indeed, they should not play basketball. Enter the wealthy and spoiled young socialite Joan Madison, played by Virginia Cherrill, better known as the Flower Girl from Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. She’s everything Peter is not and quite spirited, making her a compelling romantic interest for Peter. She spins her charm on him, and eventually, the erroneous young man comes around and learns to like having girls at his school. Then, his basketball team plays the girls’ team in a symbolic acceptance of the new college status quo. Though it was your average, run-of-the-mill ’30s rom-com, John Wayne found playing the role so embarrassing that he almost quit acting altogether.
Why Did John Wayne Hate ‘Girls Demand Excitement’?
John Wayne’s name is synonymous with rugged masculinity, far more at home on the western frontier than as a college student upset by the fact that girls attend his college. Wayne considered the film a total embarrassment, making him consider quitting acting altogether. Wayne put it succinctly in a 1976 interview in The Bobby Wygant Archive:
“So the next picture they had me do [after ‘The Big Trail’], they had been training some girls to play basketball for some musical that they were going to make that would cost a lot of money. Now with the depression, they’ve decided against it. So now they have these girls that have learned to play basketball. So they write a story about a college in which the boys don’t want the girls there. So it was probably as ridiculous a thing as I’ve ever been in.”
John Wayne was still a college student at the time of filming. Acting was, and in some respects still remains, a risky business. You might never make a mint, and Hollywood is replete with broken dreams of celluloid glory. So, being the practical man he was, he simultaneously pursued education. He wondered how he could face his then fraternity brothers from college who would surely razz him over playing Peter Brooks. It would surely make him a less popular guy on campus. But his complaints didn’t end there, as Slash Film reports. He found the film vulgar. Wayne described the film as “couples hanging out of windows in each other’s clutches, leaving lipstick everywhere.” It deeply embarrassed his masculine sensibilities, and he contemplated leaving the business. That is until he was cast in several Westerns, catapulting him into the star audiences know today.
After the catastrophe of Girls Demand Excitement, Wayne went on to star in more Western films, but it would still be awhile before he became the tough-talking, stiff-legged-walking gunslinger audiences would fall in love with. “They made me a singing cowboy,” he told Playboy in 1971, in the style of Gene Autry, even though he could not sing or play guitar. By this time, Wayne had had enough of the studio experimenting with his image. “Every time I made a public appearance, the kids insisted that I sing The Desert Song or something,” Duke explained. “But I couldn’t take along the fella who played the guitar out on one side of the camera and the fella who sang on the other side of the camera.” He felt like he was letting down his fans when he would show up and could not deliver on the character his fans so badly wanted him to be. So he did what the Duke does, and he marched right into that studio and told them he was done making those kinds of movies. And of course, it worked! While it would be a while before he hit stardom, John Wayne took the first steps down a trail that would later immortalize him as the quintessential American cowboy.