One of the most iconic and recognisable Hollywood stars to ever grace the silver screen, John Wayne appeared in a vast quantity of movie productions over the course of his long and illustrious career. The Iowa-born actor grew up with dreams of being a football star, but that all changed when he was introduced to John Ford as a prop boy during the 1920s. Once he began appearing in films in the mid-1920s, the actor was quickly typecast as a stoic, all-American hero known mostly for his appearances in westerns.
By the time Wayne’s career hit its peak, sometime around the 1940s or 1950s, the actor was as inseparable from the western genre as horses, cacti, or weirdly intense bar fights with a pianist in the corner. As a result, his career became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the more western films he made, the more were offered to him. Particularly in the early years of his career, there seemed to be very few roles the actor would actively turn down, which culminated in more than a few questionable appearances.
Wayne made a lot of classic films, but he also made a lot of terrible films that have since been forgotten, thankfully. From the bizarre Cold War romance plot of 1957’s Jet Pilot to the dismal Vietnam war-era propaganda flick The Green Berets, it is fair to say that Wayne made a few notable miss-steps during his time in Hollywood. Ironically, though, the actor also gained a reputation for turning down countless roles that went on to become huge for their eventual actors.
Dr Strangelove, High Noon, Gunsmoke, The Dirty Dozen, and Spielberg’s 1941 are just some of the projects that Wayne rejected or abandoned during his career. For somebody who made a wide range of terrible films, he seemed to grow increasingly picky over his projects as his career progressed, particularly after the success of his work during the 1950s and early 1960s. Seemingly, though, many of these projects were turned down for a specific reason.
In the documentary film Talking Pictures, Wayne is quoted as saying that he would turn down any role that was “mean and petty”. The actor went on to explain, “I think I’ve established a character on a screen that may be rough, may be cruel, may have a different code than the average person, but it’s never been mean and petty or small.”
While it is certainly true that Wayne tended to lean towards ‘heroic’ film roles, playing characters that were sometimes flawed or violent but always, at their heart, good-spirited, there are many Wayne characters that could easily be classified as mean. For instance, Wayne’s famous role as Ethan Edwards in the 1956 epic western The Searchers, was pretty mean throughout the vast majority of the film.
Sure, Edwards was impacted by the abduction of his niece, but it is difficult to defend his vengeful, indiscriminate, and brutal killing of the Comanche tribe. Murdering Indigenous people is not all that rare within the field of western films, but Wayne’s character in the 1956 film is particularly brutal and unfeeling in his approach to the act. It certainly doesn’t help that his character is an open supporter of the Confederacy and, by extension, slavery, either.
It is possible that Wayne himself might not have recognised the egregiously mean nature of his character in The Searchers. After all, the actor himself was consistently outspoken in his horrendously racist views, and his furiously violent reaction to Sacheen Littlefeather at the Oscars in 1973 should tell you all you need to know about his dismissal of First Nations in the United States.