Back in 1959, critics were already wondering if John Wayne was too old to play a gunslinger.
Rio Bravo was released that year, and the romantic age difference between the 51-year-old and 27-year-old co-star Angie Dickinson received negative reactions in reviews.
Nevertheless, the Hollywood star found ways to play an older cowboy over the next two decades, even as his health began to fail dramatically.
Wayne was 65 when he shot one of his last westerns, 1973’s Cahill US Marshall, which celebrates its 50th anniversary today.
The film had Duke playing a widowed US Marshal who neglects his two sons when he finds them mixed up with an outlaw in a bank robbery.
Director Andrew V. McLaglin felt that Cahill’s US Marshall “wasn’t your typical John Wayne movie. It’s a deeply personal story about children neglected by a father who’s just trying to do his job.”
The star was far from in good shape, however, as a cancerous lung was removed again in 1964. He was also suffering from emphysema in his remaining lung.
Being terribly weak, Wayne had to use a ladder to climb onto his horse in the movie. As for riding shots from long range, Duke’s Cahill was doubled by Chuck Roberson.
When Cahill’s US Marshall hit movie theaters, both audiences and critics thought Wayne really should have played the boys’ grandfather. However, at the time, he had three children the same age as his on-screen sons played by Gary Grimes and Clay O’Brien. Furthermore, many men in the nineteenth century did not have children until middle age.
However, Duke was accepting of his existence in the winter of his days, after hearing that his longtime collaborator, director John Ford, was dying of cancer. Upon the news of his death in August 1973, Duke told reporters, “I’m pretty much living on lost time.”
Barely helping matters, Cahill US Marshall had his film’s worst review since playing Genghis Khan in 1956’s The Conqueror. Produced by Duke’s son Michael under his father’s production company Batjac, Cahill failed to live up to the praise Wayne received for his Oscar-winning role. In the movie True Grit in 1969.
The star later admitted of the 1973 Western: “It just wasn’t a good picture. It needed better writing, and it needed a little better care in making it.”
Wayne would go on to make two better received Westerns in the True Grit sequel Rooster Cogburn opposite Katharine Hepburn and The Shootist. The latter film saw him play a terminally ill fighter. The Hollywood icon himself died of cancer just two years later in 1979.
[ad_2]
