John Wayne won his first and only Academy Award for his memorable performance as cantankerous lawman Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. The 1969 Western marked Wayne’s last triumph within the genre, which he had virtually dominated since his star-making role in the 1939 Western film Stagecoach.
In the early 1970s, Wayne’s box-office standing was being threatened by the advance of a younger generation of Hollywood leading men, led by Clint Eastwood, whose rise to superstardom coincided with Wayne’s commercial decline. Wayne hastened this transition by turning down the titular starring role in the 1971 action thriller film Dirty Harry, which enabled Eastwood to transcend the international stardom he’d gained from Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy film series and become Hollywood’s foremost action star.
Release Date
December 23, 1971
Runtime
102 minutes
Director
Don Siegel
Wayne’s regret over passing on Dirty Harry compelled him to make his first foray into the contemporary action genre with the 1974 action film McQ, which was tailored to incorporate elements from Dirty Harry and its 1973 sequel Magnum Force while also modernizing Wayne’s fading screen image. In McQ, Wayne plays Lon “McQ” McHugh, a police detective who goes rogue to gain vengeance for his partner’s murder. He followed this up with yet another attempt at Dirty Harry’s vibe with his 1975 offering Brannigan.
However, despite the novelty of seeing the aging Wayne apply his fabled gunslinger persona to a contemporary setting, audiences reacted rather indifferently to Wayne’s modern action hero transformation. What 1970s audiences really seemed to be clamoring for was the on-screen pairing of Eastwood and Wayne, a dream project that was derailed by Wayne’s enduring status as an unchanged man in a changing world.
‘McQ’ Proves That John Wayne Wasn’t a Good Fit for ‘Dirty Harry’
McQ
Release Date
January 4, 1974
Runtime
111 Minutes
Director
John Sturges
Writers
Lawrence Roman
When John Wayne was offered the starring role in Dirty Harry, Dirty Harry was set in Seattle, which was moved to San Francisco when Clint Eastwood took the role. In transporting the Dirty Harry model to McQ, the makers of McQ decided to set their film in Seattle, where Wayne’s character, Lon “McQ” McHugh, lives on a boat at a Seattle marina while winding down his career as a police detective. McQ drives a trendy 1973 Pontiac Firebird car and wields an assortment of modern weapons throughout the film, including a MAC-10 submachine gun.
In a fast-paced opening sequence, a gunman, who is later revealed to be McQ’s longtime partner, inexplicably shoots two police officers to death before being shot in the back by another gunman. In contrast to the lone, terrifying villain Scorpio in Dirty Harry, the shooting of McQ’s partner sets McQ off on an investigation in which McQ navigates a gauntlet of assassins, crooked cops, and drug dealers before arriving at a convoluted solution, which feels and looks like the conclusion of a typical episode from a 1970s detective television series.
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While McQ has some impressive action scenes, and Wayne exerts a commanding, genial screen presence, McQ is most interesting to watch as a symbol of how clearly uncomfortable Wayne was with the coarse language and gratuitous violence that increasingly defined the 1970s cinematic landscape. While Wayne dutifully embraces the rogue-cop persona, McQ’s rule-breaking ways are tame compared to the fascist vigilantism that’s featured in Dirty Harry.
Given how protective Wayne was of his screen image, it seems unfathomable that he could have starred in Dirty Harry in its current form, unlike Eastwood, who has never seemed to be particularly worried about his image and what other people think of him.
Wayne Followed ‘McQ’ With a Second ‘Dirty Harry’ Rip-Off
Release Date
March 21, 1975
Runtime
111 Minutes
Director
Douglas Hickox
Writers
Michael Butler, William P. McGivern, William W. Norton, Christopher Trumbo
The overwhelming reality that John Wayne, who was 66 when McQ was released theatrically, was too old to star in Dirty Harry is plainly evident with Wayne’s second and final contemporary action starring vehicle, the 1975 action thriller film Brannigan, in which Wayne plays Jim Brannigan, a grizzled Chicago police lieutenant who travels to London to collect a vicious American gangster, who is kidnapped before Brannigan can take custody of the gangster.
While Brannigan differentiates itself from McQ with a lively buddy cop dynamic, in which the fish-out-of-water Brannigan is partnered with a straitlaced English detective, played by Richard Attenborough, a convoluted plot and sluggish pacing make Brannigan seem much more dated than Wayne’s classic, timeless Western films, like Red River, Rio Bravo, and The Searchers, all of which had accrued a much more enthusiastic following by 1975 than Brannigan and McQ have over the past 50 years.
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Wayne Didn’t Want to Work With Clint Eastwood
Following the release of the 1973 Western film High Plains Drifter, which was the first Western film that Clint Eastwood directed and starred in, Eastwood expressed an interest in starring in a film alongside John Wayne. The project that Eastwood had in mind was a Western called The Hostiles, in which a gambler wins half the estate of an older man, whom the gambler subsequently forms an uneasy alliance with. Eastwood bought the script, which was written by Larry Cohen, with the intention of playing the gambler alongside Wayne as the older man.
In response, Eastwood received a scathing letter from Wayne, who expressed serious disapproval of High Plains Drifter, in which Eastwood plays a mysterious gunslinger, known as the Stranger, who is hired by the residents of a corrupt frontier mining town to protect them from the three vicious outlaws who have been terrorizing the residents. In his letter, Wayne expressed disgust over Eastwood’s treatment of the Old West in High Plains Drifter, in which the morally ambiguous Stranger assaults a woman and metes out brutal justice to the outlaws.
Stunned by Wayne’s harsh rebuke, Eastwood abandoned The Hostiles, which went unmade. The closest that Eastwood and Wayne came to working together was through their mutual relationship with Eastwood’s mentor, Don Siegel, who directed Wayne in the 1976 Western film The Shootist, Wayne’s final film.
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