John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [132]
LIFE IS A CIRCUS
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along with Donovan’s Reef, put Wayne at number two in the top ten box-office stars.
When filming on McLintock! ended in January 1963, Duke took off in the Wild Goose with his family for some much needed rest.
Then, in May, he reported to the Desilu studios to make a cameo appearance in George Stevens’s epic about Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Much has been said about an appearance so brief. In the role of the centurion who accompanies Christ to Calvary, Wayne said, “I felt like a fraud but since United Artists were willing to pay me and then keep my salary to help pay off my debt to them, I thought, what the hell. They put me in this heavy Roman uniform and when I did the chin straps up I looked exactly like every other Roman soldier there.
I figured that since they were using my name to bring in the customers, they ought at least to be able to see me, so I left my chin strap undone.
“I really was nothing more than an expensive extra. I had no lines to say, just like Sidney Poitier who they also got in at the last minute to play Simon of Cyrene. And there was Carroll Baker with no dialogue. We were all fucking extras. I only did two days’ work.”
The film’s director George Stevens was savaged by the critics for, firstly, filming in Utah and, secondly, for having so many stars who appeared fleetingly. The biggest criticism of all was the casting of Wayne as a Roman soldier. Carroll Baker came to Stevens’s defense when I interviewed her at her London home in 1979, telling me,
“George wanted to film the whole thing in Israel. The movie industry begged him not to; to give the work to the people in Hollywood. It was expensive to make a film that big in Hollywood and would have been better and cheaper filmed in the Holy Land. Then they said the movie was running too far over budget, so they said, ‘We’ve got to get some names in it,’ and the only place was at the end. Everyone was in the last fifteen minutes; me, John Wayne, Sidney Poitier, Pat Boone.”
Most of the all-star cast had good cameo roles to play, including Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate. He was surprised to find one particular famous and unlikely name on his call sheet for the trial scene. He said, “I looked at the call sheet for the day and saw John 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 248
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Wayne’s name. I thought, John Wayne? It’s probably an extra with the same name.
“We worked all day, and I didn’t see any sign of Wayne. Finally I said to George Stevens, ‘Where’s John Wayne?’ He said, ‘He’s down there with Max [Von Sydow]. He’s the soldier who’s got Christ under arrest.’ And I looked and there he was. I hadn’t recognized him in that Roman gear, and he’d been there all day.”
There is a famous but untrue story concerning Wayne’s only line of dialogue in the Crucifixion scene, and this is the time to put the record straight. According to legend, Wayne said his line “Truly this was the Son of God” three times, none of them to Stevens’s satisfaction. So Stevens said, “Can you give it a little more awe, Duke?” and Duke said, “Aw, this was truly the Son of God.” Very funny. But not true.
When I interviewed Roddy McDowall on the set of The Thief of Baghdad at Shepperton Studios in 1977, he talked about his work on The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he played the disciple Matthew, and about John Wayne’s brief appearance as the centurion.
Said McDowall, “We shot the Crucifixion on a soundstage in the studio. It was a marvelous set. There was hardly any dialogue except between the actors playing the two thieves and Max as Jesus. I promise you, John Wayne as the centurion did not say a word. If you watch the film closely, when you hear his voice saying, ‘Truly this was the Son of God,’ you don’t see his lips move, and that’s because George Stevens had decided he wasn’t going to let the audience hear Wayne. In fact, he shot the scenes of Jesus carrying his cross and the Crucifixion in such a way that you hardly knew it was John Wayne.