OVP: The Shootist (1976)

Film: The Shootist (1976)

Stars: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, Sheree North

Director: Don Siegel

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the 1970's, John Wayne as a persona was not something the hip, New Hollywood cinema had an obvious fit for, but the actor was bankable & kept working.  True Grit had been a proper hit, and he actually ended up acting for much of the decade while other headliners of his generation like Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart had to sit back and take supporting parts.  Films like Big Jake, The Cowboys, McQ, and Rooster Cogburn (a sequel to True Grit) all made money, and it was pretty clear at this point that it wasn't going to be changing tastes that eventually stopped John Wayne, but instead Father Time.  That came to pass in 1976 with The Shootist.  Wayne once again donned his cowboy hat and spurs, but this would be the last time that he would.  Fittingly, in many ways it recalls a film that he once turned down (The Gunfighter), and stars a host of major names of the past to watch him in his final ride.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Shootist takes place over the course of a single week, and starts with gunfighter JB Brooks (Wayne) finding out from his physician, Doc Hostetler (Stewart) that he is dying of cancer, and will soon die of that if he doesn't go out in a blaze of glory.  The film then becomes a series of vignettes, with Brooks meeting with a number of people from his past, many of whom are trying to profit off of their connections with a famous gunslinger since he will no longer be able to gain from it himself.  During this time, he lives in a boarding house run by Bond Rogers (Bacall), a widowed mother of a young man named Gillom (Howard) who is fascinated by Brooks' history of violence and death.  As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Brooks will not go down to cancer, but instead (in a very rare moment for a John Wayne film, as the actor only died a handful of times onscreen during his fifty-year career) he is killed in a gunfight, one that hopefully turns off Gillom (who flees rather than engages, despite his obsession with this type of violence) and protects the next generation from the mistakes of the past.

The Shootist on its merits is an oddly-structured film.  The vignettes take a bit to get used to, particularly given that you rarely can tell which characters are going to stick around and which you need to invest into, and honestly, because in many cases actors like John Carradine & Harry Morgan feel less like they are paying tribute to the film itself, and more are there marveling at Wayne, doing his final ride.  That morbid curiosity, quite frankly, is what makes The Shootist worth something.  If you take it just as a movie, it's okay, but forgettable.  But understanding that Wayne, one of the most important figures of the Old Hollywood era, was coming to an end (in many ways taking that era with him), something that Wayne himself likely understood given his age, it makes the film a lot more powerful.  It helps that Wayne is very solid in this movie, playing the part with a type of desperation, a type of bargaining, that feels unusual for the two-dimensional actor, giving a fine performance (a worthier performance to give him an Oscar for than True Grit if the Academy had been inclined).

Wayne never made a movie again.  Contrary to common belief, Wayne wasn't battling cancer when this film was made, though he did struggle with a serious case of influenza during the filming of the movie.  In 1979, though, he was afflicted with it when he was given the task of handing the Best Picture Oscar to The Deer Hunter (a movie, let's be honest, the conservative Wayne probably loathed), and if you look at the clip you can see a visibly shaken Wayne, getting a standing ovation (which in those days of the Academy were quite rare) while longtime colleagues like Gregory Peck & Laurence Olivier look on the verge of tears.  Wayne opened the presentation, a little winded and his voice breaking just slightly, with "(Oscar) and I are both a little weather-beaten, but we're both still here, and plan to be around for a whole lot longer."  The Hollywood icon would be dead just 9 weeks later.

With us finishing John Wayne month, the quintessential cowboy in our year devoted to the leading stars of westerns, next month we're going to move into a new chapter in our series.  For the final five months of 2023, we'll focus on actors who made their name in westerns during the New Hollywood era, when the western went through a transformation and would eventually fall out-of-fashion.  We'll start with an actor who who would become synonymous with the western, despite hailing from a place far from the American West.