I Watched The Shootist (1976) and Reckoned With John Wayne’s Legacy in Texas

Reader, if you only know me from my impeccable writing, you might assume that I’ve gotten so rich off my newsletter that I don’t need a day job. But you would be wrong! I’ve been a copywriter by trade for more than a decade now. And each year, the marketing department of the company I currently work for goes on a two-night retreat somewhere in the Southeast. The sort of team building that dreams are made of.

This year, we spent two nights in Forth Worth, Texas.* Our hotel was right around the corner from a thing called John Wayne: An American Experience, which was on our list of potential team activities one day.** And wouldn’t you know it, my boss asked me if I’d like to be the group leader for this excursion.

I wasn’t asked to lead my peers through a guided tour or anything. But given that I’ve only seen a handful of the Duke’s many films, I did feel compelled to do a bit of research. And I figured that John Wayne’s final performance—The Shootist, a Western about a dying gunslinger—might help me reckon with his legacy a bit.

As you probably already know, John Wayne wasn’t born John Wayne.*** He was born Marion Morrison, picking up the nickname “Duke” from his childhood friends before finally agreeing to change his name in full when he arrived in Hollywood. One of his first directors actually suggested “Anthony Wayne,” taken from a Revolutionary War general, but the studio chief said it sounded “too Italian.” (Sound racist? Just you wait!)

One can view John Wayne’s whole acting career as a lifelong reinvention. Sure, he had to have some inherent “toughness” in him to play football at USC, but he gravitated to roles like cowboys and military leaders for a reason (even though he declined to serve in WWII). He wanted his on-screen image to represent his off-screen life as well. He chose to play “good guys” so that he could be viewed as one too. “For the John Wayne you see on the screen is the same John Wayne you see in the flesh,” as US Magazine wrote just a year before he died.

He was often very good at playing those heroic figures, delivering great performances in plenty of landmark Westerns and war movies. And then, at the end of his career, The Shootist provided an opportunity to subvert some of those manly tropes that he clung to. Mostly because he didn’t have a choice—Wayne was getting old, and though he wasn’t yet stricken by the second cancer that would eventually take his life in 1979, he had already beaten lung cancer a decade earlier.

If Wayne’s intent was to have his screen persona mirror his “true self” (even though he was never a cowboy or a soldier), so it was with The Shootist. The film both echoes and predicts his battles with “the Big C,” a term that he allegedly coined. Wayne plays a legendary sheriff-turned-gunslinger named John Bernard Books who has killed dozens of people in his time and now fears that death is finally coming for him.**** His suspicions are confirmed when he visits a doctor friend (played by Jimmy Stewart) who tells him that he only has a few months to live.

Wayne was given final approval of the script, so the film isn’t as subversive as it could’ve been. Though it’s set in 1901 and there are signs of progress all around, Books still clings stubbornly to the “old ways” as much as he can—just as Wayne did. Nonetheless, it gave Wayne an opportunity to play a different variation of a familiar character, one that provides a fitting bookend to a legendary career.

I found it to be rather moving. Whatever your thoughts may be about the Duke, it’s fascinating to witness a performance like this.***** A character that admits he’s “a dying man scared of the dark” moments after the local sheriff tells him he’s “plain plumb outlived [his] time.” A character that gets to etch out his own tombstone and plan ahead to die on his birthday. Wayne didn’t intend on The Shootist being his swan song, but perhaps he saw the writing on the wall and put as much of it on the screen as he could bear.

Speaking of walls with writing on them, I couldn’t help but think about The Shootist as I wandered through the halls of John Wayne: An American Experience. And not just because it was the film of his that I’d seen most recently.

The museum is just as carefully curated as the man’s own career was—if you were to somehow go in blind, with no preconceived notions of who John Wayne was, you’d walk out thinking he was the greatest man to ever live. It’s full of costumes and props from his whole career, letters to U.S. Presidents and iconic directors and actors, and plenty of other artifacts. There’s even a quote from Sammy Davis Jr. that says “Duke Wayne…was not a racist,” which is the sort of thing that goes in your museum when you’re definitely not a racist.******

While the movie memorabilia was pretty cool to see, I found this shrine to John Wayne’s undisputed “greatness” to be a bridge too far ultimately. But it helped me establish a level of artistic separation that works for me—one that won’t keep me from watching his great films. So if you’re ever curious about deconstructing the myth of this American icon, for better and for worse, you might want to start at the end of his career.

*If you’d like to debate whether or not Texas is in the “Southeast,” please direct all of your comments to my editor John.

**Not to be confused with the John Wayne Birthplace & Museum. Because everybody knows he was born in Iowa.

***At the entrance and exit of John Wayne: An American Experience, visitors are told that John Wayne was never “born,” so he will never “die.” (Shouts out to that copywriter.)

****That’s right, just a few months after writing about Harrison Ford’s character in Witness, I stumbled upon a character name that’s only one letter different. There’s even a minor character named Mr. Book in Dark City, which my pal Ryan wrote about last month. Is this a sign that I should read more or something?

*****I really enjoyed this personal essay from Billy Russell over at Movie Jawn about John Wayne’s performance in The Shootist.

******I didn’t want to write a John Wayne hit piece because plenty of smarter people have already done so. But it would be irresponsible of me to not mention that he was, in fact, quite racist. Here’s a good recap of his 1971 Playboy interview that went viral a few years ago for being, well, super racist.

The Shootist is now streaming on Amazon Prime, Paramount+, and MGM+, and it is available to rent elsewhere.