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John Wayne: Shootist
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It is with Hawks ...—in El Dorado and Rio Lobo—that Wayne enters the last phase of his career, where the central concern becomes age and failing powers. The Cowboys was not, as some asserted, the first film in which Wayne died (they forget, for example, Reap the Wild Wind, Sands of Iwo Jima, and, far more reprehensibly, Liberty Valance), but it is the first of his major roles in which he was killed face-to-face by the bad guy. Even more pertinent is The Shootist, in which he plays an aging gunfighter who is dying of cancer, the disease against which he himself struggled throughout this late period. If The Cowboys (in which Wayne explicitly becomes a role model for the young of America) celebrates the "national institution," even at this stage of his career where the image is at its most petrified it still carries connotations—pain, loss, failure, stoical endurance—which makes it less simple than the popular view of "hawk" patriarch suggests.
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The deal consolidates much of the home entertainment distribution of John Wayne films under one roof. Paramount's now owns 63 Wayne titles, such as "True Grit," "El Dorado," "Big Jake," "The Shootist," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "Donovan's Reef," "Hatari!" and "The Sons of Katie Elder," among others. Broad integrated marketing initiatives are planned across both home entertainment and television divisions in support of the Batjac titles throughout 2005 and 2006.
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By the Sixties Wayne had become an American institution, too formidable for the good of his films except when working with Ford or Hawks. The long-awaited Oscar came for his portrayal of Roogster Cogburn, the one-eyed war-horse in True Grit (1969), but it was a tribute to Wayne's long career than to that particular performance. With his last film, The Shootist (1976), man and myth became inseparable: the movie begins with a sequence of clips from old John Wayne movies, a requiem for the character he is playing - an ex-gunfighter dying of cancer - and for himself.
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Synopsis: About ten minutes into The Shootist, Doctor Hostetler (James Stewart) tells aging Western gunfighter John Bernard Books (John Wayne), "You have a cancer." Knowing that his death will be painful and lingering, Books is determined to be shot in the line of "duty." In his remaining two months, BooksRead More
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To support The Shootist, Wayne was interviewed on Backlot USA, a 1976 summer show hosted by Dick Cavett, the Donahue show, and the film was the subject of an episode of NBC's Big Event. The movie stiffed at the box office despite glowing reviews.
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