In the post-war period, Hollywood became inundated with western movies and television serials. For some reason, the only way the American World War II survivors could conceive of forgetting all the guns and violence was with cowboy movies brimming with guns and violence set a little closer to home. Early on, John Wayne was undoubtedly the biggest player on the prairie, with appearances in classics like The Searchers and Rio Bravo.
As Wayne stretched his legs as the rootinest, tootinest cowboy in Hollywood in the late 1950s, a new kid entered the saloon: Clint Eastwood. The star first made a name for himself on the TV series Rawhide and began to draw level with Wayne as fierce competition in the 1960s with a run of highly successful pictures, including Sergio Leone’s acclaimed Dollars Trilogy.
Leone’s masterpieces were known as spaghetti westerns because he realised flying his crew out to Italy to shoot his movies was cheaper. Following the success of A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 and the following year’s For a Few Dollars More, Wayne was well aware of Eastwood as his rival gunslinging thespian.
At the time, Wayne had nothing but respect for Eastwood and thoroughly enjoyed the final movie in the trilogy, The God, The Bad and The Ugly. After this resounding success, many considered Eastwood the leading western star, and the movie remains the most iconic of the genre today.
Following his success as the ‘Man with No Name’, Eastwood brought his tough-guy image into the urban setting to portray Harry Callaghan in the Dirty Harry franchise. Starting in 1971 with Dirty Harry, the series of movies spanned over five movies, ending with The Dead Pool in 1988. Again, Wayne was awed by Eastwood’s success in the early Dirty Harry movies, but feelings of regret and envy began to enter play.
As it transpires, before Don Siegel cast Eastwood in Dirty Harry, he offered the role to Wayne. Allegedly, Wayne felt offended to be offered a role that had previously also been declined by crooner-cum-actor Frank Sinatra and declined. After seeing the movie’s successful outcome, he came to regret the decision, admitting, “I made a mistake with that one”.
The famous feud between Wayne and Eastwood hadn’t quite broken out at this point. However, Wayne’s simmering envy undoubtedly came into the equation when, in 1973, he took his first swipe. Capitalising on his acting success, Eastwood began to branch out into direction and helmed his first western, High Plains Drifter, in 1973. Wayne abhorred the movie and made sure Eastwood knew his thoughts.
Written by Ernest Tidyman, High Plains Drifter is centred on a morally corrupt antihero. Famously, Wayne had an exceedingly nationalistic and conservative outlook and valued moral virtue in his movies. He ensured that his heroic characters were morally virtuous, killing enemies face-on so as never to shoot a man in the back. By no means could the actor enjoy a movie in which an antihero subverted the heroic image of the American people who chartered the Wild West.
So incensed was Wayne that he decided to write Eastwood a letter. “John Wayne once wrote me a letter saying he didn’t like High Plains Drifter,” Eastwood once told Kenneth Turan. “He said it wasn’t really about the people who pioneered the West. I realised that there’s two different generations, and he wouldn’t understand what I was doing.”
The Dirty Harry star parried Wayne’s forthright opinions by explaining that his movie simply came from a different, as yet unexplored angle. “High Plains Drifter was meant to be a fable,” he said. “It wasn’t meant to show the hours of pioneering drudgery. It wasn’t supposed to be anything about settling the West.”