THE SHOOTIST: John Wayne, the End of an Era, and My Dad

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

My dad reminds me of John Wayne’s late stage film career. My dad was not particularly a fan of John Wayne movies, but he liked his fair share: The Searchers is an undeniable classic. But in his prime, John Wayne represented an America that no longer existed. He was a solid actor in solid movies, but he was more an icon than anything else. He was a Marilyn Monroe. He was a James Dean. There was just something in his presence that drew audiences to see him. 

For me, it wasn’t until his later career that he really represented something human to me. My dad loved The Shootist. In it, John Wayne--at the end of his life, at the end of his career--plays J.B. Brooks, a legendary shootist who is also at the end of his life, at the end of his career. Brooks is dying. He has cancer. The year is 1901 and the Wild West is coming to an end. There are street cars with plans to go electric. There are automobiles. The Shootist isn’t the first, or the last, Western to be about The End of the Wild West. The Wild Bunch has been there, even the video game Red Dead Redemption has done that. But The Shootist is about so many things coming to an end, and John Wayne anchors it. 

In the 1970s, cinema was changing. It was being crafted by a new crop of directors who had, for the first time in film’s history, been raised watching movies. They had learned the tricks of the trade when they were just kids, so John Wayne’s movies, which were stubbornly old-fashioned, felt like they too were dying. 

On the cusp of change, of endings and new beginnings, The Shootist was directed by Don Siegel, who had made his fair share of stubbornly old-fashioned pictures, from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with all its Red Scare, anti-communist paranoia, and the gleefully fascist Dirty Harry. The thing is with those movies, they may harbor some deeply problematic ideals, but they are well-crafted and… well, great. 

Hell, John Wayne is nothing if not problematic. The man, in an interview with Playboy, proudly declared he supported White Supremacy. In an era of “Cancel Culture”, John Wayne would no doubt be subject today to scrutiny for the awful things he’s said. And very well he should. Modern society has no room for shitty people who believe, and say, shitty things. He’s the face of memes saying things like, “Laughs in toxic masculinity,” becoming the face of contrarian trollery that eschews basic decency to own the libs. The thing is, even today, I don’t think anyone could ever deny John Wayne had a certain je ne sais quoi that couldn’t be replicated. His personality, his screen presence, his swagger, his manner of speaking, it was a perfect storm to create the Legend, the Icon. 

J.B. Brooks, Wayne’s surrogate, in The Shootist, is a world famous gunman. After learning that he is dying and has only weeks, maybe months, to live, decides to go down in a final blaze of glory. Three men have an itch to kill him, and he decides to give them their chance to do it. If one of them kill him, they would assume a legendary status, being The Man Who Killed J.B. Brooks. If he should survive the gun battle, he can has a false belief that somehow he may be able to live his final days in peace. The thing is, he doesn’t intend to survive. He intends to go out swinging, but this is his way of killing himself, to die on his own terms. 

I always wondered what it was about the late-stage film career of John Wayne that appealed to my dad. My dad loved The Cowboys, a sort of minor Wayne feature. I think it was because of the juxtaposition of Wayne against a Hollywood that was slowly phasing out the western. My dad, similarly, was a contradiction of sorts: A renaissance man, a Republican, a hippie, an iconoclast who vowed never to watch Star Wars because no one would shut up about it, and an old softie who was just as out-of-place in this world as John Wayne was in a film movement that was gravitating toward realism and no longer had room for icons. Audiences wanted actors with naturalism. 

John Wayne may have finally won his Oscar for True Grit, but his best performance belongs to The Shootist. Brooks is a talented enough gunman, but he credits his longevity not to his skills with a firearm, but to his cynical ability to sense danger and be able to use swift violence as a reaction. It kept him alive for decades, and never happily so. Brooks is the most famous living remnant of the Wild West, has money to spare, but has to constantly sleep with one eye open, always looking over his shoulder, as fame-seekers wishing to make fame as his killer, come gunning for him. 

Watching The Shootist recently, I couldn’t help but view Wayne’s performance as an extension of my dad. The way Wayne would deliver certain lines with a knowing sense of humor reminded me much of my dad. My dad died last year, and this movie, one of his favorite Wayne performances, is forever in my mind going to be associated with him, and it’s appropriate, so amazingly appropriate that it’s about death. It’s not just about death, it’s about accepting it. It’s about the fallout to follow. It’s about the legacy of a life, the legend of a death, separating the lies from the truth. It’s about human death, both real and fictional, and the end of two eras: The Wild West and Western films in general. Long before things were known as “meta,” The Shootist embraced and redefined meta.