John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [160]
The story centers on the kidnapping of his grandson, played by his own son Ethan. The film was largely a reunion for much of its cast.
Richard Boone played the dastardly kidnapper, and Maureen O’Hara appeared all too briefly as Wayne’s ex-wife. Wayne leads a rescue party which included Pat Wayne and Chris Mitchum. Old friends like Bruce Cabot and Harry Carey Jr. also appeared. Cliff Lyons directed second unit, and Chuck Roberson was playing a bit part as well as doubling for Wayne, although Duke still insisted on doing as many of his own stunts as possible.
“About the only thing Duke couldn’t do was run,” said Richard Boone. “He didn’t have the stamina anymore, which God knows comes to us all. But his biggest problem was with breathing. He always had an oxygen tank nearby and he used it often. But he never wanted his public to know. It wasn’t vanity. He just didn’t want to let his fans down, so no one was allowed to take photographs of him using his oxygen.”
This was Boone’s second film with Wayne, and one he relished.
“When you get to kidnap Duke Wayne’s son, you know you’ve got to be a mean son of a bitch, so I was as mean as I could be. I had a great time, and I had great respect for Duke.”
Directing the film was George Sherman, who had produced The Comancheros but hadn’t directed Wayne since the days of “The Three Mesquiteers.” He said, “We’d both come a long way since 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 300
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those early days. I hadn’t directed a major film for a long time when Duke asked me if I’d like to do Big Jake. I have to admit, I was grateful. But I knew that by 1970 Westerns had changed a lot. I admired Duke for playing a character his own age, yet he was still the same tough character people liked. We only had to establish his age with the fact that he was playing a grandfather, and with a few lines of dialogue. We also established that times had moved on along with Duke by setting the film at the beginning of the twentieth century and having Chris Mitchum ride a motorbike instead of a horse.
“But the biggest change was the violence in films by 1970. Duke disagreed with me on this, but I said we had to make the violence more realistic because audiences had come to expect it. He reluctantly agreed. But I told him we’d offset the violence with plenty of good humor.”
Consequently, Big Jake became one of the most blood-splattered films Wayne ever made. And yet it retains a good old-fashioned style by virtue of George Sherman’s methods. The result on-screen made for a good John Wayne Western in the grand old manner but without seeming too outdated.
Despite Howard Hawks’s criticism of Big Jake under Sherman’s direction, the film made almost twice as much at the box office as Rio Lobo. And Wayne did not have the likes of Robert Mitchum or Dean Martin that Hawks always insisted was needed to play against Duke.
Wayne was able to carry the film on his own broad if tired shoulders, and even today the film stands up well. It’s not The Searchers, but it’s superior to films like Chisum and The Undefeated.
But Duke was beginning to feel that he needed to do something different from the standard John Wayne Westerns. He told me, “I got to a point when I felt that I couldn’t go on playing the tough gunfighter and I was looking for something with a different angle to it.
So when Warner Bros. sent me a script called The Cowboys, I saw that it was the kind of thing I was looking for.”
The Cowboys cast Wayne as a sixty-year-old rancher whose men quit just when he needs to get his cattle to market. The only men offering their help are a gang of villains led by a particularly nasty character played by the superb Bruce Dern (who’d appeared in The 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 301
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War Wagon). Wayne’s character knows he’s likely to lose his