The fact that John Wayne started his acting career way back in the 1920s meant that the Iowa-born western movie icon saw the many changes that were made in Hollywood throughout the 20th century, not all of which he liked. After all, there was a big difference between the Golden Age of American cinema and the later New Hollywood movement that would arrive in the late 1960s.
Wayne had first come up towards the end of the silent era, though he made his most prominent roles in Hollywood’s Golden Age, which began around the time that sound started being used in movies up until the end of the 1960s, by which point Wayne had made a deep impression on the industry.
After appearances in the likes of The Big Trail, Stagecoach, Red River and The Searchers, Wayne eventually won the ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award in 1969 for his effort in True Grit. He had already been nominated for the award back in 1949 for Sands of Iwo Jima but lost out to Broderick Crawford, who’d starred in King’s Men.
Wayne believed that he’d lost the Oscar because Hollywood was suddenly becoming left-leaning from a political perspective. He once told Roger Ebert of the occasion, “That little clique back there in the East [New York] has taken great personal satisfaction in reviewing my politics instead of my pictures. And they’ve drawn up a caricature of me.”
The actor had also been concerned that Hollywood was no longer interested in making “family pictures” but had moved their attention to movies that used excessive sex and violence, which would, in his eyes, make the cinema-going experience less of a pastime for the entire family and more of a habit of moral decline.
Wayne noticed, though, that audiences tended to get bigger when a picture was deemed violent or scandalous, but felt that this would only play into the hands of the studios rather than those who made the narratives in the first place. He said, “They don’t know a goddamned thing about making movies. They make something dirty, and it makes money, and they say, ‘Jesus, let’s make one a little dirtier, maybe it’ll make more money.’”
Hollywood was indeed changing, and Wayne expressed his dissatisfaction with the movie The Wild Bunch, a western that was wildly popular for its over-gratuitous scenes of violence. After all, Wayne himself had considered himself the big player in the western genre, and suddenly, the kind of movies that he had been making were being left behind.
His political views were rightfully being called into question, and “the good old days” were receding into the distance in the rearview mirror as Hollywood took on a more liberal and daring approach, inspiring perhaps by the European New Wave movement that was taking the cinematic world by storm over the Atlantic Ocean.
Wayne died in 1979, around ten years after Hollywood seemed to make its departure from the Golden Age into the kind of cinema that we all know and love today. The actor would indeed be written into the annals of film history, but he left his legacy way behind, perhaps becoming somewhat irrelevant in the grander scheme of the medium.
