If you’ve ever heard an actor say that they never read reviews of their own movies and thought, ‘Yeah right,’ consider the case of John Wayne barrelling toward a critic while on a train in a fit of rage. Of all the stars who didn’t need to worry about poor reviews, it was him. His name above a title was enough to draw an audience, regardless of who the director was or what the critical consensus was.
One of his worst movies, The Green Berets, was also one of his highest-grossing. It was a war film released in 1968, during the Vietnam War, and it was staunchly pro-conflict. Roger Ebert detested it and lambasted it for being deeply problematic. “The Green Berets simply will not do as a film about the war in Vietnam,” he wrote. “It is offensive not only to those who oppose American policy but even to those who support it.”
If Wayne had met Ebert on a train, he might have socked him right in the jaw, especially considering that he had also been a co-director of the film, but luckily for the critic and the history of film criticism, he did not. The person he did meet on a train was British journalist Barry Norman, who presented the BBC show Film… in the 1970s and ’80s.
The incident occurred sometime around the release of Wayne’s film True Grit, for which he would win his only Oscar. The train was going from Denver, Colorado, to Salt Lake City, Utah, for the movie’s premiere, and it was packed with journalists. Groups of six to eight were rotated into Wayne’s cabin to interview him, and when Norman’s turn came, he didn’t use the opportunity to chat about his role as Rooster Cogburn but to argue about the actor’s decidedly hawkish stance on Vietnam.
In an interview with News Shopper in 2010, Norman remembered that the fight escalated quickly. “It really pissed him off,” he said, “But to be honest he had drunk 15 double Borbourns and it was only midday. That might have had something to do with his bad temper.” At one point, the star stood up from his chair with what Norman felt was the obvious intention to hit him.
“He’s a big man,” he said, “And if he tripped and fell on me he’d probably have killed me.” He figured he could probably outrun the hulking star, even on a train, but luckily, the trusty PR people from Paramount stepped between them and diffused things. Whether Wayne was aware of Norman’s critical opinion of his filmography is unclear, though it probably wouldn’t have soothed his temper if he was.
You might think that the western star would have walked away with the title of ‘most challenging interview subject’ as far as Norman was concerned, but he didn’t. That distinction fell to Robert De Niro. “Probably the worst and strangest was Robert De Niro, who only does interviews because it’s in his contract,” he said. “He doesn’t like doing interviews, gives as little as possible, is monosyllabic and, in my experience, is kind of charmless.”
Norman is far from the first journalist to note De Niro’s complete and utter lack of effort in interviews, but considering what a high bar Wayne set when he nearly decked the man for his very uncontroversial opinion that America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was unforgivable, it really makes casts De Niro in an unflattering light.