John Wayne: one last shot before the final farewell - Telegraph Classic Movies John Wayne: one last shot before the final farewell In 1976, battling the cancer that would kill him, John Wayne stepped in front of the camera for one final face-off. The result was 'The Shootist’, a rich and elegiac western and, says Philip Horne, a fitting swansong for Hollywood’s most courageous gunslinger. Image 1 of 2 His last stand: John Wayne in a scene from 'The Shootist' (1976), made when he was terminally ill with cancer. John Wayne in The Shootist Photo: PARAMOUNT/ALLSTAR By Philip Horne 5:51PM BST 20 Sep 2010 During the making of The Shootist (1976), Don Siegel’s rich, elegiac western about an ageing gunfighter dying of “a cancer”, its star John Wayne became too ill to film. The actor had had a lung removed twelve years earlier and was now struggling with the stomach cancer that would eventually lead to his death in 1979.

A few days later, when Wayne bravely returned to the set, he picked a quarrel with the director, who had carried on filming a gunfight scene in his absence, over the way his character was shown killing a villain. He forced Siegel to redo the scene, declaring: “Whatever the cause, I would never shoot anyone in the back. It’s unthinkable for my image… I spent many years in this business building up my image.” He certainly did – but he wasn’t the only one. The 6ft 4in Marion Morrison was a former USC American football player with a few bit parts to his rather girlie name, when he was spotted carrying an armchair across the Fox Studios lot by legendary director Raoul Walsh (one-eyed, but sharp-eyed). Walsh cast him in The Big Trail (1930) – a western, the genre Wayne would above all be associated with – and renamed him after Revolutionary War general “Mad Anthony Wayne”. But it was director John Ford who turned Wayne into an all-time star, by casting him as the Ringo Kid, in Stagecoach (1939), which is perhaps the definitive western (though based on a Maupassant novel).

Wayne’s character makes his first appearance standing on the trail, firing into the air to stop the stagecoach and, as the camera whips in to a breathless close-up, he announces that: “You might need me and this Winchester, Curly!” In his dark placket-front shirt, light army-style braces, bandana and broad white hat, Ringo is a dazzling vision of male beauty and heroism. Wayne was already 32, with 78 films behind him – but the freshness of this “Kid” is unforgettable. Related Articles John Wayne's eye patch up for auction 28 Sep 2011 The Shootist opens with a montage of its hero’s past exploits – taken from Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), Hondo (John Farrow, 1953), Rio Bravo and El Dorado (Hawks, 1959 and 1966). It’s clear this is a summation of Wayne’s career as well as that of his character in The Shootist, JB Books.

Younger film-watchers may not be so aware of the Wayne legend, or of his films – it was against the heroic Wayne, in a sense, that the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone (and then Eastwood) were angled; so too were the Seventies anti-westerns of Peckinpah. Wayne’s fame is probably not dissociable, in fact, from the Cold War era – from anxieties about communism (his quite reactionary politics could be ugly) and gender (it’s often clear that his characters, men’s men, are ill at ease with women). But no one who sees a good John Wayne film (and there are many) will forget his complex, dignified presence. He was large, physically powerful, with a rolling gait, increasingly craggy as time went on – but always a careful watcher of others and a man of few words. He had indomitable courage and a basically decent heart, though also a quick temper and a capacity for black, violent rages. The great Wayne films directed by John Ford don’t figure in The Shootist montage – they’re too distinctive and different in tone.

It was Hawks (at least according to Hawks) who discovered that Wayne could actually act, making him the ruthless Thomas Dunson of Red River – and in that auteur’s view: “If you try to make a western with somebody besides Wayne, you’re not in the sphere of violence and action that you are when you’ve got Wayne.” It was after this that Ford again used him for westerns – starting with the Cavalry trilogy of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), in which he plays respectively youngish, oldish and indeterminately middle-aged characters in three films within a period of two and a half years. Wayne had already turned 40 and the elegiac is the keynote of these films. By the Fifties the western was being reshaped and challenged by new, noirish approaches. Although James Stewart (directed by Anthony Mann) and Randolph Scott (directed by Budd Boetticher) were perhaps the pioneers in the reinvention, Wayne played his part in it, too.

Indeed, he is magnificent as scary, obsessed, conflicted, heroic loner Ethan Edwards, “a man that can go crazy wild”, in Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers (1956), which was an inspiration for Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Without his seniors, Ford or Hawks directing him, though, Wayne could be lazy or wayward and autocratic. In his 1993 autobiography, A Siegel Film, Siegel is amusingly vivid about Wayne’s “difficult” behaviour. In the Sixties and Seventies, a grumpy Wayne complained that in the old westerns antagonists despatched each other by the gun – while in the new ones they preferred to talk each other to death. But as the American critic Andrew Sarris points out, the (highly patriotic) films Wayne himself directed, The Alamo (1960) and The Green Berets (1968) are themselves very talky. Good directors – like Ford, Hawks and Siegel – knew how to pare down Wayne’s dialogue and make use of his surprising subtlety.

Hawks said that on Rio Bravo, where Dean Martin is his wrecked, drunken deputy, Wayne wasn’t at first sure how to play their scenes. The director’s tip: “He’s your best friend, watch him. See whether he is coming through.” And Wayne replied: “OK, that’s enough for me.” It obviously was. Toward the end of his career, Wayne often played parts trading self-consciously on his star image – and sometimes, in True Grit (1969), for which he won his Oscar, and The Cowboys (1972), for example, the films are seriously rewarding entertainment. The Shootist, based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout, is the culmination of this reflective, retrospective tendency. It was known that it might be Wayne’s last film, so there’s a remarkable supporting cast – above all James Stewart in a fine cameo as the Carson City doctor (Wayne and Stewart had co-starred in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)), but also Lauren Bacall and the young Ron Howard (who would go on to direct Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon) – as well as the great western veteran Richard Boone.

The movie is set in January 1901 – Queen Victoria has just died – and in Carson City, Nevada, which has telephones, trams and motor cars, and is planning on introducing metalled roads, gas lamps and electricity. It is the whole 20th-century package. However, Wayne’s character, the abrasive JB Books, almost sole survivor of the violent Old West, does not belong in this tame, commercialised new world – about which the film is pretty ambivalent. A succession of venal characters try to exploit the nationwide fame of Books – by interviewing, marrying, burying, or stealing souvenirs from him – while quite a few others want to kill him. The nasty little sheriff wants to drive him out of town. But while the film is tinged with bitter ironies, the touching drama of his relations with his landlady (Bacall) and her restless son (Howard), who idolises Books, plus our certainty that a John Wayne movie is not going to end with its hero dying of cancer, make it an involving, exciting experience. The Shootist is a fitting memorial to a great star – and leaves his image indelibly fixed on our imagination.

Free John Wayne DVDs Get The Shootist free on DVD inside next Saturday’s Telegraph; and another John Wayne classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with Sunday’s paper. Philip Horne is Professor of English at UCL Start your free 30 day Amazon Prime trial» Best Actor: Alternate Best Actor 1976: John Wayne in The Shootist Monday, 17 August 2015 Alternate Best Actor 1976: John Wayne in The Shootist John Wayne did not receive an Oscar nomination for portraying John Bernard "J.B." Books in The Shootist. The Shootist is an interesting film about the last days of a famed gunfighter, although I don't believe it quite reaches the heights that seem possible from its central idea. The last film of an actors career can sometimes be unmemorable in that it just is another film in their filmography like The Harder They Fall for Humphrey Bogart, it sometimes can be quite memorable for the wrong reasons like Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 From Outer Space where it is an unfortunate indication of where their career ended up, or it can seem like the right final showcase for their talent that seems like a final reflection on their career.

Clark Gable had this with The Misfits, Burt Lancaster had this with Field of Dreams, but perhaps the most perfect example of this has to be John Wayne's last film being the Shootist. Wayne was always known best for his work in westerns, and it's fitting for that last film to be in that genre. This takes a step further than that since the central character is dying from cancer, unfortunately what Wayne would die of a few years after this film. Not only that but in a way the story of J.B. Books seems to be that of many a John Wayne character and in way this is both a sendoff for Wayne, and for all those various western heroes he played throughout his career. Every time I've covered John Wayne outside of his Oscar nominations they've been for somewhat atypical performances for Wayne. The first being the Quiet Man as the romantic lead where he played a guy whose problems came from his refusal to fight, and the other being for The Searches where he was the lead in a western but as a much harder and colder man than usual. That is not the case with this film as J.B. Books feels like the end to a more typical John Wayne villain.

The film has a certain dark edge to it, but it in itself isn't all that dark. Books's life is not that of William Munny from Unforgiven, Ryunosuke from The Sword of Doom, or even Wayne's own Ethan Edwards where the violence of the men was most often a result of their own selfishness or viciousness. It's made known that Books only kills people who break one of his few personal rules, and as well that he even spent time as a law man. This is not unlike the more typical Wayne character, and this is John Wayne style John Wayne performance. Of course in the war films and the westerns the effectiveness and strength of the typical Wayne could vary, sometimes it would work, sometimes less so, luckily The Shootist is the very best John Wayne John Wayne performance I've seen. Wayne is especially on here to say the least as he just has this grander larger than life quality often what he seems to be striving for in his performances, and this is fitting quite well to the man of J.B. Books who is considered the living legend, the last great gunfighter. Wayne carries himself well with this in man as his whole stature and manner here feels that of such a man.

Wayne's presence is in his usual way but stronger than in any other film as this sort of man. There just is something more remarkable here as Wayne brings something extra as though Books is not like those previous characters, but instead seemed to have been everyone meaning he's lived quite a life. There is a gracefulness evident here that seems indicative of his ways as a shootist. Whenever he does deal with someone with the gun Wayne plays these scenes perfectly by not giving any hesitation or fear in Books, instead he portrays Books as being basically a professional in the way he takes down any opponent. What Wayne does not put in though is any sort of sadism in Books as again this is a John Wayne type of character, and the film presents every man he kills as basically making the first move against him, although this is not to say that it's quite the simple within Wayne's performance. I would not necessarily put John Wayne as one of the most charming actors of all time, that was never exactly part of his appeal, but here Wayne really is incredibly charming.

It's an intriguing one though as Wayne again does not feel that different from his earlier similair performances, but it seems as though he learned from all those earlier work as he makes himself charming within the rough and tough sort of character. Wayne just seems to hit his mark every time in this film as his little bit of humor thrown in here or there in some of his banter in dealing with phonies or just other folk works especially well here. All the old Wayne tricks and touches are here, but Wayne makes them the best he's Wayne has a generous amount of warmth in his performance here and his chemistry with Lauren Bacall as local inn keep named Bond is surprisingly effective. It's not romantic chemistry in this case, but rather just a honest feeling companionship that they develop. Wayne is wonderful in their more tender moments together as he shows quite clearly a love of life within in Books, and that the cancer that's killing him is no way a blessing, even with so many gunning for his life, rather Wayne shows he's a man who has enjoyed his time on earth even though it has not always been easy. The film is not a depressing requiem as there is something very encouraging about Books right until his last scene in the film.

There is that darker edge within there and this mostly comes from Wayne's own work. Although Wayne is quite moving in portraying that enjoyment of life in Books, that is not all there is when Bacall's character does press him a bit more on his life and what exactly it has lead to. In these moments Wayne is striking by revealing a deeper sorrow in the man as though when he is forced to truly reflect on things that all that he's done has not added up to enough. There is a powerful anguish in moments, and although in the end Books goes to face death head on, Wayne suggests a most definite fear of this when Books is at his lowest moments. The best moments of his performance is when he deals with Bond's son Gillom (Ron Howard) who idolizes the man. The younger man is eager to learn all the tricks from Books about gunfighter, and he's eager enough to shoot with him as well as tell him the truth that it's more about will and nerves than accuracy in a gunfight. What's outstanding about Wayne's work though is how he actually undercuts these words with his own delivery of them.

He ends up being quite heartbreaking actually when he tells Gillom these things it is not pride that Wayne conveys rather he brings a considerable sadness in them as though Books himself is realizing that what's he's best at and what he's defined his life with is not something worth living for. This is a great performance by Wayne because he does not leave death as a one note. There is of course sadness in there in those moments of regrets, there's those glints of nostalgia, as well as the appreciate of what's still left there. What makes this truly special though is that John Wayne is also able to make it feel like one final hurrah for his whole career as a star, as almost everything that defined that is found here through his portrayal of J.B. Books, and not only that Wayne happens to make it the greatest iteration of that classic John Wayne persona. Posted by The Cowboy Rides Away: John Wayne and The Shootist (1976) by Jake Hinkson Jake Hinkson This is the second entry in a series on the final Westerns of the great cowboy stars. The previous entry looked at Gary Cooper and The Hanging Tree . Don Siegel’s The Shootist is an elegy.

Made three years before John Wayne’s death from cancer, it tells the story of a gunfighter (or a “shootist” to use the archaic newspaper term) who rides in from the range, gets a room in town with a prim widow woman and her impressionable son, and settles down to die. The film is an elegy for many things—for the Western itself, for the idea of the cowboy hero, but mostly it’s an elegy for the man who, more than any other, defined the idea of the American film hero for the entire world. By any standard, John Wayne had an amazing career. Born Marion Morrison, he started out in pictures in the 1920s as just another tall, good-looking guy in crowd scenes—a football player here, a solider there. (In the 1928 Noah’s Ark, he survived the botched flood sequence that killed three extras.) Raoul Walsh gave him his big break playing the lead in the epic 1930 Western The Big Trail. The film was a flop, and Wayne spent most of the next decade riding the range in cheapie oaters, playing second fiddle to guys like Tim McCoy and gradually working his way back up the call sheet.

His second big break—the one that actually succeeded in breaking him out of the world of Poverty Row horse operas—was John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach. He was 32, a bit old to be playing someone called the Ringo Kid, but there was no doubt he was a star. Those nine years had taught him how to work a camera, how to pace his walk, how to listen to other actors. (“I’m a reactor,” he once said of his approach to his craft.) He looked like he’d been born with a gun in his hand, and though he famously didn’t care for horses, you can never catch him thinking about what he’s doing with one. He rode like it was second nature. For much of the forties, fifties, and sixties Wayne was a superstar. Like most leading men of his day, he did a little bit of most things (adventure, drama, comedy, romance), but the Western was his true calling. During these years, he made the films that movie geeks and cineastes still love him for, the films by revered directors Howard Hawks and John Ford.

Dark and brooding (Red River, The Searchers) or light and fluffy (Rio Bravo, 3 Godfathers), these are films that are beloved by the kind of people who also love classics and foreign films and art house flicks. These are the John Wayne movies beloved by people who don’t normally love John Wayne movies. By the end of the sixties, however, Wayne had outgrown both Hawks and Ford in stature and influence. As the postwar American consensus came apart, Wayne picked his side in the culture wars and in so doing became something more than an actor. He became an icon for a certain brand of reactionary Americanism. Roughly speaking, then, you can divide Wayne’s career into three phases. Phase One (Wayne as Apprentice) lasted from his entry into films in 1926 to 1939. Phase Two (Wayne as Superstar) lasted from 1939 to about 1968 when he made his Vietnam propaganda picture The Green Berets. Phrase Three (Wayne as Icon) lasted from about 1968 to the end of his life.

During this last phase, Wayne stopped being a romantic lead and fully transitioned into being a caustic authority figure and a political lightning rod. Oddly enough, for a man whose career lasted the better part of fifty years, it was his films of his final period that have, in many ways, defined him since his death in 1979—at least for the people who love him the most. For while movie geeks might cherish the Hawks and Ford films, diehard John Wayne fans love movies like Chisum (1970), Big Jake (1971), and Cahill US Marshall (1973). It doesn’t matter who directed these films—the real auteur here was Wayne himself. By the 1970s, no one was telling John Wayne how to be John Wayne. All of this makes The Shootist more interesting because it’s one of the few films where those two diverse audiences—the film geeks and the John Wayne fans—can find common ground. It’s not one of the regular John Wayne shoot ‘em ups that had arrived in movie theaters every year like clockwork for decades on end. It was slow and quiet, a Western drama rather than a Western adventure.

It’s a film about death. Most Westerns, it should be noted, are very much about life—about the struggle to survive. Only a few really address themselves to the subject of dying. The Shootist is melancholy, but it’s not haunted by violence and regret in the way that something like Eastwood’s Unforgiven is. It’s not about the past, it’s about the rapidly dwindling future. In case we didn’t get the point, the film begins by recounting the storied gunfighting career of its protagonist and shows us clips from some of John Wayne’s past movies. We see him mowing down indiscriminate bad guys in black and white, and then the film switches to color and we see him—heavy and tired-looking but still able to quick draw. We’re reassured that he “never killed a man who didn’t deserve it.” This is what I mean when I say the film isn’t haunted by the consequences of violence or by any sense of regret. Maybe that’s another way of saying that the film isn’t an elegy for the complicated, bloody history of the West, but for the heroic movie career of John Wayne himself. The film is notable for all the Western talent involved.

Jimmy Stewart is on hand to evoke not only his own cowboy career but his teaming with Wayne in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , Harry Morgan’s cowardly sheriff recalls his turn as the cowardly city councilman who abandons Gary Cooper in 1952’s High Noon , and John Carradine is here as the last link back to Wayne’s youth in Stagecoach. In the final shootout Wayne guns down Western mainstays like Richard Boone, Hugh O’Brian, and Bill McKinney. Even Ron Howard, here as the kid, had done plenty of Westerns by 1976. The only major member of the cast who didn’t have Western bona fides was Lauren Bacall, who plays the widow who befriends Wayne in his final days. In a way, though, Bacall serves another function—linking us back to Bogart (the liberal, city counterpoint to Wayne’s conservative, rural hero) and to old Hollywood. At the center of it all is Wayne, still as powerful a screen presence as ever. His eyes are as blue as they ever were, but damn it if they’re not unmistakably tired and sad.

He brings a weary dignity to the role—as well as the authenticity of a man who had already suffered terrible health problems, with more on the horizon. By the end of his life, John Wayne had about as much power over his films as any actor ever had, so he deserves no small degree of credit for ending his career with an ideal encapsulation of his screen persona. Few stars ever ended their career on as perfect a note as The Shootist. The Shootist 1. The Shootist flashed into Glendon Swarthout's imagination early one Arizona evening in 1973 while shaving before going out in Scottsdale, their hometown. My dad told my mother, Kathryn, "Hold on, I just had a terrific idea. We're gonna be a little late for the party." He then sat down at his desk and in about forty-five minutes outlined the basic story of what would become two years later, one of his best-known novels and certainly the best film ever made from one of them. The Author's Note to this special new Berkley Press edition states that ï¿½'gunfighterï¿½ is a word of recent coinage.

A survey of Western newspapers of the late 1800's shows that a man notorious for his skill with handguns and his willingness to use them was called, variously, a ï¿½gunman,ï¿½ a ï¿½mankiller,ï¿½ an ï¿½assassin,ï¿½ or a ï¿½shootist.ï¿½ï¿½ Hence, this now famous title, which revived an old Western term and capped the Western film career of our greatest of all the celluloid cowboys, the legendary John Wayne. The Duke, by the way, hated this title at first and tried to get it changed for the film. He thought the audience might be confused, thinking the picture had something to do with parachuting instead! My father had read a medical article stating that one of the leading causes of death among old Western cowboys was, surprisingly, neither lead poisoning nor rope burns, poor food or hygiene, or just plain badly made whiskey. Instead, it was cancer of the prostate.

For back in the late 1800's all cowboying was done from the back of a horse, and the constant pounding a man's buttocks took day after day in the saddle led many of these hard-riding buckaroos to have severe problems with their prostate glands in their old age. So there was Glendon's innovative premise -- a legendary gunman and ex-Sheriff is diagnosed with an incurable cancer when he rides into newly urbanized El Paso at the turn of the century. The doctor, played by the equally legendary Jimmy Stewart, gives this aging shootist several options, surgery not being one of them -- "I'd have to gut you like a fish." He could die in bed in excruciating agony; the doctor could drug him out of his misery with laudanum, a favored medicinal elixir of that era which was heavily laced with opium. Or, Stewart, tells him, "I would not die a death such as I have just described, not if I had your courage." Based upon several unsold scripts for television I'd written while a grad student in Telecommunications at the University of Southern California, my dad offered me the privilege of adapting his forthcoming novel. I leapt at the chance.

The Shootist was originally published by Doubleday to very good reviews and has gone through several editions in paperback prior to this special new one, as well as being reprinted in numerous foreign editions. It was also honored by the Western Writers of America with their Spur Award as the Best Western Novel of 1975, and then-President Ronald Reagan endorsed it as "one of the best Westerns he'd ever read." We sold the book and screenplay together to independent producer, Mike Frankovich, the former head of Columbia Pictures. Glendon split his $350,000 fee with me, and one of the many things I'll always be grateful to him for was that this money enabled me to set myself up as a screenwriter and embark on a new career. Luckily for us, John Wayne had heard about this upcoming Western and began actively lobbying for the lead role of J. B. Books. Producer Frankovich took our project to another legend, Dino de Laurentiis, who was financing his own movies via sources in Europe and had a releasing deal through Paramount Pictures. When the story was described to him, Dino, in his fractured English, reportedly replied, "Cowboy?

Oh yes, John Wayne, he'd be good!" The cast Mike Frankovich and additional producer William Self managed to round up for The Shootist was extraordinary, for word had gotten around Hollywood about the Duke's declining health and that this might actually be his last ride in the movies. So many of show businesses' finest veteran actors pitched in at far below their normal salaries to give Wayne some needed box office support. What a cast! Jimmy Stewart, Richard Boone, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, Scatman Crothers, Sheree North, Hugh O'Brian, Rick Lenz, Harry Morgan, and John Carradine all were recruited on a budget of only $4.5 million, which was fairly low even by 1976 standards. Filming began up in Carson City, Nevada, at nearly five thousand feet, which required Wayne to have oxygen assistance and a nurse assigned to him twenty-four hours a day, due to the fact that he was down to one lung, after having another removed due to cancer a few years before.

Besides his physical difficulties working at altitude, Wayne caught a serious flu bug which shut production down for several weeks and by the time he was up and about again, the director, Don Siegel, came down with the same virus, causing producer Frankovich to take over filming for a couple days. By now the company had moved back down to the back lot of the Burbank Studios (now the Warner Brothers lot), where veteran set designer Robert Boyle had constructed a four hundred thousand dollar downtown set, which looked something like the real El Paso of 1901, when it was just about the last of the roaring southwestern boomtowns. In the film, though, the town was called Carson City, to match the residential and outdoor backdrops of that Nevada area. Boyle deservedly received an Oscar nomination for his set designs in the film, especially the Metrople Saloon, which was doubling for the Acme Saloon, where the notorious Texas gunfighter/lawyer, John Wesley Hardin, was shot in the back of the head by an old ex-Sheriff (John Selman) as he stood at the bar rolling dice for drinks on a hot August night in 1895.

The Shootist is, in fact, loosely based on research my father did on the amazing life of John Wesley Hardin, the only gunfighter ever to write his own autobiography and pass the Texas bar exam after spending much of his later life in prison for shooting forty-four men and leading the Texan rebellion against the hated Yankee-carpetbagging State Police for some years after the Civil War. Wes Hardin was also famed for having two six-guns sewn into special holsters stitched on either side of a custom vest, but when they rigged this up in wardrobe, John Wayne was already too heavy and awkward handling the extra bulk under his suitcoat, so the filmmakers had to settle for the old standard six-shooter on the hip. But they finally got it all in the can and filming ended with few of the principals still speaking to one another. That acrimony didn't hurt the picture, though, since Wayne was supposed to be playing a sarcastic, cantankerous character somewhat full of himself in the twilight of his years, and that role fit John Wayne's real personality in his final years like a glove.

In a line from the novel and the film that has been quoted innumerable times in cinema histories and film retrospectives of the Duke's long career, J. B. Books, the celebrated shootist, instructs Ron Howard in gunmanship and states his personal creed, "I won't be wronged; I won't be insulted; I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them." This now famous credo resembles the personal code of ethics John Wayne's own druggist father taught him as a boy: "Always keep your word; a gentleman never insults anybody intentionally; and don't go around looking for trouble, but if you ever get in a fight, make sure you win it." Both creeds still make pretty good words to live by in this tough day and age. Although it didn't make much of a dent at the box office, The Shootist certainly became a big hit on television, playing cable, network prime-time and syndicated television innumerable times and selling countless videocassettes for Paramount Pictures worldwide.

In a 1995 survey taken among a hundred members of the Western Writers of America, The Shootist made a clean sweep, voted by them one of the twelve greatest Western novels ever written, as well as one of the fifteen finest Western motion pictures ever made. Glendon Swarthout also made their list of the twenty-six best writers of Western fiction and non-fiction of all time. Lengthy mention of the Duke's last ride has also been made in every Western reference book published since the film was released, and it is generally considered by film experts and his fans to be one of John Wayne's five finest Western films, along with Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, and True Grit. So what you are about to read is a true Western ï¿½classicï¿½in every sense of that too often overused word. On the proudest day of his literary career, June 27th, 1991, Glendon Swarthout received the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Western Writers of America at their convention that year at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

He'd certainly created bestsellers like They Came To Cordura and The Homesman that had already won acclaim and awards as some of the finest Westerns ever written, but where he really made his mark in this most American of all genres was in Hollywood. Every single western story Glendon ever wrote was either optioned, sold, or finally produced into a Western film, a track record in show business I doubt any other writer will ever top, in any genre. Glendon was an absolute, original master of the western, which was all the more amazing coming from a college professor of English literature who grew up in a small farming town in Michigan and never rode a horse, or even owned a Stetson, or a pair of cowboy boots. Dad died of emphysema little more than a year after that grand day in Oklahoma City. I scattered his ashes high up near the camel's head of Scottsdale's famed Camelback Mountain, overlooking his beloved Paradise Valley, where hedreamed up most of his finest tales of gunfights and adventure set among the cactus and cowboys, Indians and cavalrymen of the great old American West. His like will not pass our way again.

Miles Hood Swarthout is a screenwriter who has also had articles published in the Los Angeles Times and the Arizona Republic. Part of this forward first appeared in The Roundup, the bi-monthly journal of the Western Writers of America, where it won their 1994 Stirrup Award for the Best Article appearing in that publication. "The Making of The Shootist" was also part of a longer article about "The Westerns of Glendon Swarthout, "which appeared in the "Hollywood and the West" issue of Persimmon Hill (spring 1996), the quarterly magazine of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. That particular special issue was the biggest-seller in the over thirty-year history of that distinguished magazine, long known as one of the most beautiful publications published annually in America. Glendon Swarthout 2. Director -- Don Siegel. Starring -- John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, Hugh O'Brian, Sheree North, and Scatman Crothers. This low-budget film didn't do well at the box office when Paramount dumped it on a limited number of screens with very limited promotion and advertising in October of '76.

The studio only owned domestic exhibition rights to the film, sold them by producer Dino de Laurentiis, who kept all foreign rights himself. As it turned out to be the great Wayne's final film, however (he died from lung cancer only two years later), The Shootist has since become a TV perennial and been written-up prominently and appreciatively in every picture book about the Western film since. With its good screenplay based upon Glendon's award-winning novel, and fine performances by a truly amazing cast, this film has gradually become recognized by film historians and Western buffs for what it really is -- one of John Wayne's five best Westerns and certainly one of the most memorable Westerns from the Seventies, a generally weak decade for the genre. The tremendous cast came together at producer Mike Frankovich's behest, and all were willing to take much smaller fees in support of the ailing cowboy legend, for they knew this might well be his last ride before the cameras. Indeed, a doctor had to be paid off under the table to even get Wayne past his insurance physical. Already down to one lung, he had a nurse with him 24/7 with oxygen handy due to the higher elevation in Carson City, Nevada.

Production had to be shut down for two weeks when he got the flu, and only a few months after filming Duke had open heart surgery. No wonder he was cranky on the set, complaining and giving everybody hell about everything! Don Siegel got good performances out of the entire awesome supporting cast, Bruce Surtees' cinematography was great and Robert Boyle's Oscar-nominated sets superb. The film's only weaknesses were Harry Morgan as the Sheriff and Elmer Bernstein's unmemorable score. The Shootist is also famed child actor Ron Howard's last screen role (he's now a more famous director), and the screenplay by Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale received a Writers Guild nomination for Best Adaptation. In 1995 this movie was voted by a hundred members of the Western Writers of America as one of the 15 Greatest Westerns ever made. Do see John Wayne's valedictory farewell to films, playing a fabled Western gunfighter dying of cancer (too true!), who even sums up his legendary career in one great line -- "In general, I've had a helluva good time!" The Duke goes out with his boots on and his six-shooter smoking, exactly the way Western movie heroes should.

This now classic Western remains a fitting final tribute to an authentic American legend. Reviews "The Shootist will stand as one of John Wayne's towering achievements, and his very best since True Grit. Don Siegel's terrific film is simply beautiful, and beautifully simple, in its quiet, elegant and sensitive telling of the last days of a dying gunfighter at the turn of the century. Wayne and Lauren Bacall are both outstanding. Dino de Laurentiis sponsored the very handsome Mike Frankovich/William Self production, which could become a major box office hit for Paramountï¿½The entire film is in totally correct balance, artistically and technically, a major credit in Frankovich's long production career. Robert Boyle's production design, Bruce Surtees' cinematography, Elmer Bernstein's music and all other key components support this magnificent depiction of people and their society at a fulcrum. The Shootist is one of the great films of our time."----------Art Murphy, Variety "With The Shootist, a grandly elegiac Western superbly directed by Don Siegel, John Wayne once again goes with richer, more fully dimensional material than usual as he did with True Grit.

Once again it pays off handsomely with a film that is among his and Siegel's finestï¿½ Splendidly designed by Robert Boyle and photographed by Bruce Surtees in appropriate autumnal tones, The Shootist is a film of much resonance, enriched by the regard Siegel has for his cast members and they for each otherï¿½Wayne, Miss Bacall--astringent and regally beautiful in her first major screen role in years--and Stewart are stars rich in associations that further enhance the film's meanings and emotions. Wayne naturally dominates with his larger-than-life presence yet reveals to us rare tenderness and vulnerability. The Shootist is a very special film indeed."----------Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times "If, God forbid, John Wayne should choose to end his incredible career right now, after more than 45 years in films, I can't think of any more perfect picture to fade out on than this Frankovich/Self production of The Shootistï¿½ Just when it seemed the Western was an endangered species, due for extinction because it had repeated itself too many times, Wayne and Siegel have managed to validate it once more.

The Shootist may well become a classic, ranking right up there with many of Wayne's earlier masterpieces."----------Arthur Knight, the Hollywood Reporter "Wayne's proud, quietly anguished performance, one of his very best and certainly his most moving, has a richness that seems born of self-knowledge; he lends the film a tremendous sense of intimacy and a surprisingly confessional mood. The Shootist is, in its own reserved way, John Wayne's single-minded statement about both the burden and the triumph of being John Wayne. The big name supporting cast performs beautifully, but it is very much a supporting cast, perhaps in tribute to the stature of its star."----------Newsweek "The Shootist, Wayne's latest film, seems destined to become one of the classics. As such it could take its place beside Red River, True Grit, and all those John Ford epics starting with Stagecoach. The new film is different. It is filled with pain, melancholy and death. Perhaps it might even be called a film of despair. It is about moral choices, but unlike so many Westerns, the moral decisions of its protagonist are not unquestionable ï¿½The Shootist is a blending of many talents.

Glendon Swarthout's novel is the basis for an intelligent script by Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale. Wayne, Miss Bacall, Harry Morgan, James Carradine and others turn in fine performances. Don Siegel, the director, again proves he is a filmmaker with few peers in America."----------Dennis Stack, Kansas City Times "The Shootist is the fascinating, often entertaining, always moving and humane story of how a legend dies with courage in the face of adversity. Director Don Siegel paints a softly focused canvas of the changing West at the turn of the century, with keenly observed details and insights about the life of the times, indoor plumbing, streetcars, and the advancement of medical technology. John Wayne, in his finest role since True Grit, is a wounded eagle in an aviary of vultures. Resting his behind on a bordello pillow, scandalizing the self-righteous widow with his salty talk, bellowing and ordering everyone about and lacing his delivery with a wry twinkle, he has a fine time with the role.

There's something touching about the grandeur of the last of a dying breed, suffering on a patchwork quilt, while a 1901 Oldsmobile rattles by outside the window as a sign of progress." ----------Rex Reed, Vogue "The Shootist is a strange film if only because it tips its ending at the beginning -- Wayne, the aging gunfighter, is going to die. But it still enthralls partly because all the elements mesh properly: Don Siegel's lowkeyed, resolute direction, the beautiful modulations between black humor and heartwrenching poignancy in Miles Hood Swarthout's and Scott Hale's screenplay, and the uniformly excellent performances of the entire cast (especially those of Lauren Bacall, as the widow, and Ron Howard, as her son, who both realize they got to know this man too late)ï¿½But most of all, The Shootist is John Wayne. It was Wayne who insisted that the story be changed to reflect more optimism than Glendon Swarthout's stark book. It was Wayne who knew this would be a summation of his entire Western-movie career.

And it is Wayne who provides a performance to match the best performances of his past in Red River and The Searchers."----------Mike Petryni, the Arizona Republic "The Shootist is John Wayne's best film since John Ford's 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This Don Siegel-directed film version of Glendon Swarthout's novel may also be, with the exception of the anti-Westerns like The Wild Bunch, the best single Western since Ford's brilliant elegy to Western myth-making."----------Tim A. Janes, Tucson Arizona Daily Star "The Shootist may just prove to be a historic Western. That is a risky projection, but there is evidence to support the contention. It is, in the first place, not only a superior Western, but a superior film as well. Further, it is a notably gutsy project, presenting as it does a decidedly unconventional and uncommercial plot -- the last eight days in the life of a gunfighter dying of cancer. Additionally, it features an extraordinary cast--Lauren Bacall, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, Sheree North--several of whom accepted roles more modest in scope than they would ordinarily require.

But the main reason The Shootist should live beyond its allotted time is John Wayne. The picture probably would not have been made without him -- his personal prestige, his near legendary stature, his box office appeal -- and probably could not have been made without him. For it is, in a sense, a biography of the Duke, both man and actor. If the two can be separated. And it may well be the last film Wayne will make."----------John L. Wasserman, San Francisco Chronicle "John Wayne mellows into what may prove the finest role in his career, an aging legendary gunfighter who puts his lifelong ideals in order as he waits out the final seven days of his life. Don Siegel's absorbing, highly affecting character study is a major achievement, although a dearth of action and the story's leisurely, downbeat tones may require unusual marketing to bring out its audience."----------Independent Film Journal Produced by M. J.

Frankovich and William Self; Dino de Laurentiis / Paramount Screenplay by Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale Based on the novel by Glendon Swarthout Music: Elmer Bernstein Special Categories: Cancer; Gunfighters; Tough Guys; Death and Dying; Doctor / Patient Relationships; Coming of Age; Must See Academy Awardï¿½ Nominations: Art Direction - Robert F. Boyle Set Decoration - Arthur Jeph Parker Trivia James Stewart rejected most film offers in the 1970's, but wanted to work with John Wayne again. Stewart played a small role as a doctor and old acquaintance who tells Wayne he is dying of cancer. Wayne was, in real life, dying of cancer, and The Shootist was his last film. Reviews J. B. Books (John Wayne), a legendary gunfighter, finds has out lived his usefulness as a sixty year old in the more civilized west of 1901. Concerned about the pain in his back, he consults with his old friend, Dr. Hostetler (James Stewart) who diagonoses him with cancer. Rather than die a slow, painful death, Books sets up a meeting with several of his old enemies for a final show down.

He boards with Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall) while he waits for their arrival, and befriends her teenage son, Gillom (Ron Howard). This movie is John Wayne at his best, and illustrates his great ability as an actor. Highly recommended. ----------Mike Prestwich The Shootist Movie Review & Film Summary (1976) | Roger Ebert Tweet He rides onscreen in The Shootist afraid that he is dying. Not afraid he'll be killed, but afraid he's dying, which is the last thing we anticipated a John Wayne character would do of his own accord. It is 1901: He has outlived his century. A sawbones in the next state has given him the bad news and now he wants to hear it from the lips of Doc Hostetler, who nursed him back to health after a violent afternoon twenty years ago. And so he rides, the Shootist, into a Carson City to which the Old West has become an embarrassment. The streets are still wide enough to turn a mule train in, but now an abashed little horse trolley runs down the middle of them, and electricity's going to put the horse out of business next year.

The pain is way down deep in his back, and he rideson a red velvet cushion he stole out of a whorehouse. It doesn't do a damn bit of good. Hostetler hems and haws and comes out with it: cancer. Two months to live, six weeks, maybe less. In the meantime he can do what he wants. After a while he won't feel like doing much. Advertisement In his time, the Shootist shot a lot of men dead. Out at the livery stable, burnt into the leather of his saddle, they find his name: J.B. Books. His arrival in Carson City immediately becomes news. Hostetler steers him over to a boarding house run by the Widow Rogers, who shows him a two-dollar room. It'll do fine. Books settles down to die. But all these gunfighters had the same problem: People weren't content to let them die in bed, because they made too good a trophy. So there is a tricky dilemma: To die with some measure of dignity, and to avoid being shot in the meantime. As the film opens, Books has eight days. You will be surprised with what gentleness and humanity he lives them, before the inevitable gunfire at the end.

And unless you have already discovered that John Wayne is an actor as well as a movie star, you will be surprised by the dimensions he provides for J.B. Books. The movie isn't a bit sentimental. Everybody in town wants the bastard dead, except for the Widow Rogers and her son, Gillom. Even Doc Hostetler, who knows what people can go through toward the end of these illnesses, stops Books at the door and advises him point-blank not to wait around and see how things will eventually feel. The Sheriff is almost cheerful at the prospect of Books's approaching end. The Undertaker offers a free funeral, free tombstone, free casket, free flowers, even two mourners thrown in at no extra charge. "You son of a bitch," Books says, "you aim to do to me what they did with John Wesley Hardin. Lay me out and parade every damn fool in the state past me at a dollar a head, half price for children, and then stuff me in a gunny sack and shovel me under." He is correct. Advertisement Still, eight days are enough to establish the beginnings of human contact.

The Widow Rogers is appalled at first to have a killer as her paying guest, but an affection and respect grows up between them. Her kid, Gillom, contracts a case of hero worship even while trying to swindle the Shootist out of his horse. And Wayne, as Books, occupies the substantial center of the film. He vows to read a newspaper through from front to back before he dies. He sends his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes out to the cleaners. And he challenges three old Carson City enemies to meet him in the saloon at eleven o'clock Monday morning. It's here that the movie doesn't quite work. We hardly know the three enemies. We don't know why they'd oblige the Shootist's wish to die in a gunfight. We understand his reasoning, but not theirs. And the movie's final scene, in which Gillom Rogers symbolically steps into the Shootist's boots, is just a little too neat to be real. Westerns probably have to end along these lines with confrontations and gunfire and heroism, but The Shootist will be remembered for the quieter scenes that came before.

The cast is excellent because it understands the material, and sympathizes with it: James Stewart , as the doctor, and Lauren Bacall , as the widow, play scenes with Wayne that absolutely make us forget we're watching a movie. Gaunt old John Carradine has been an undertaker all his life; finally they cast him as one. Don Siegel's direction reveals a sensitivity we didn't suspect after films like Dirty Harry. And observe the way John Wayne says "Good day, Mrs. Rogers" to Lauren Bacall for the last time. Advertisement

Question: Who was the female lead in John Wayne's last film, 'The Shootist'?
Answer: Lauren BACALL