#622: The Shootist
It’s John Wayne’s party and he’ll die if he wants to
Initial release: July 21, 1976
Director: Don Siegel
America has long romanticized the expansionist period of the Wild West; for a while, though, especially after the 1950s, it felt like we didn’t know what to do with the genre and even now we still don’t, not really. It makes more sense, then, to talk about the end of the Old West, when the outlaws and bounty hunters hung up their guns, when all those boomtowns either dried up or became just more spokes on the rail hub, when the gunfighters, the rough riders, realized that the world they knew no longer existed, and the world they were in didn’t want them.
(Something similar happened in Japan, to the jidai-geki genre: a fixation on the end of the age of samurai in the years following the Meiji Restoration, with stories about aging swordsmen who no longer know what to do with themselves. This similarly is never exemplified so strongly as it was in the original and Japanese remake of Unforgiven.)
John Wayne in a very real way is the face of the idealistic Western. It was his films in the 1950s, often made with director John Ford, that helped create the popular conception of the Western as a story of conquest over a wild and untamed land. Wayne was also a very public firebrand of a conservative, whose reactionary politics informed much of how he approached filmmaking (he refused to do movies with Clint Eastwood, who was likewise the hard-bitten, cynical face of the revisionist Western, because he felt the kind of movies Eastwood made undermined Wayne’s own personal mission to uphold the purity of Western myth-making.) But I think John Wayne is at his best when he’s in roles incongruent to the lantern-jawed conquerer he usually plays. The dubious hero of The Searchers is challenged, however lightly, on his racism and his bloodthirstiness; Rooster Cogburn of True Grit is a mean old bastard who’s only really a US Marshall because it lets him kill people legally. And then there’s J.B. Books of The Shootist.
Books — as biographied in the early minutes of the film using archive footage from several of John Wayne’s older movies — is a former sheriff turned aging gunfighter, now in his twilight years as he enters Carson City, Nevada to see an old doctor friend. He gets some bad news: he’s got cancer, bad, and has maybe two months to live. His plan to settle in and live out his last few days in relative peace and quiet doesn’t quite work out when word gets out that a famous shootist with a body count of thirty men is in town; eventually, he comes to realize not just that his fame is hurting the woman running the boarding house he’s befriended, but that dying in one last blaze of glory has to be a lot better than dying in agony on a rented bed somewhere.
Books is a crusty old fart who’s quick to violence but is trying, for Mrs. Rogers’ sake, to be more polite, kind even. He forms a fatherly role with Rogers’ troubled son Gillom, and even a bittersweet, somewhat romantic connection with Mrs. Rogers. But it’s clear that he’s dying — he drinks laudanum throughout the day for the pain, knowing that he won’t really have enough time to get addicted to it, and moments of great exertion exhaust him. It’s weird and unsettling to see Wayne so vulnerable, but that’s what makes the role so great. Wayne himself was a cancer survivor (the rumor that he was actively dying during filming this role is unfounded, as he was in remission at the time — it came back with a vengeance a few years later.) He’d lost his entire left lung to it, and it shows in how out of breath he is throughout the film, which of course is perfectly in keeping with his character’s ongoing illness. (Now that’s method acting!)
Wayne was always a larger-than-life figure, both physically and in personality; The Shootist was more than just his last hurrah, he worked closely with Don Siegel (a frequent Eastwood collaborator) to tweak the film the way he liked it: moving the story from El Paso to Carson City, bringing in a bunch of Wayne’s friends (including James Stewart, who came out of retirement for the role of Book’s doctor) and the inclusion of his favorite horse, name and all. The Shootist, in essence, is Wayne’s own funeral, just a few years early. It’s also a funeral for his fifty-year career, and a last gasp of a film genre that was on its way out — and you can argue that the two were one and the same. The feeling, thus, is bittersweet; however you may feel about John Wayne the man, even as an elderly, decrepit, stick old bastard, he still has the screen presence to make you believe in Books, to make you root for this lonely old man who’s just looking for a dignified exit. It feels almost autobiographical: a film about a dying man at the end of a dying era, played by a dying man at the end of a dying era.
I don’t think The Shootist is a perfect movie, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I think this is perhaps John Wayne’s greatest role, at once vulnerable and dignified and broken down and doing his best. It’s so far removed from the towering figure representative of so much American self-mythologizing that you hardly recognize him, but it’s, at last, a chance for Wayne to open up a little bit, to reveal himself to an audience that has rarely seen anything but either a lantern-jawed movie hero or a bomb-throwing reactionary. Not to get maudlin about it, but The Shootist is for John Wayne what the music video for Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt was for Cash — it’s a goodbye.
Isn’t that what we’re all looking for, after all? A dignified exit?
