Though Wayne and Eastwood are forever married to the Western genre, their relationship was fractured and uneasy, leaving them with no collaborations.
John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are easily the two names best associated with the Western film genre, but the two of them never starred alongside one another in a picture and actually experienced something of a feud from the 1960s. Whereas Wayne had been a mainstay in the genre since his acclaimed breakthrough role in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), Eastwood – nearly 25 years Wayne’s junior – didn’t arrive until his unveiling as a leading man in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy (1964 – 1966). The apparent succession was difficult for Wayne, who was also dismayed by the dark transition that the genre was making, coinciding with Eastwood’s rise to fame.
Though it would not be fair to blame Eastwood for the emergence of the gritty spaghetti Western subgenre which refuted the classic Western’s unending romanticism for its depicted era, his elevation to gunslinging mainstay was only possible because of Sergio Leone. Just as Wayne and Ford are forever synonymous, as are Eastwood and Leone. In fact, it was with such momentum that the Western pendulum swung in the 1960s that Wayne outright condemned the evolution, refusing to star with Eastwood in a later film despite that Eastwood was eager to work with him. Because the two subgenres were never reconciled, it meant inevitably that Wayne and Eastwood would never be either.
John Wayne Hated Eastwood’s Take On The Western
John Wayne and director John Ford together epitomized the early 20th-century dedication to portrayals of the Old West: charming, starry-eyed, and probably a bit out of touch. Though many from the era were still alive by the time of the genre’s golden age, its most popular additions were stubbornly inaccurate and over-idyllic. When Clint Eastwood – and the spaghetti subgenre with which he was best associated – came along, the ideals of unambiguous morality, American Exceptionalism, and Manifest Destiny were torn apart. Wayne, perpetually patriotic and conservative, was opposed to such progressiveness and was particularly irritated by Eastwood’s rising star, which arguably came to surpass his own for a time in the ‘60s.
Clint Eastwood & John Wayne Represented Two Different Generations
The landscape of the Western had changed drastically by the end of the 1960s. Not only had the revisionist subgenre (whose durability would carry it all the way 21st century, best exemplified by the 2016 miniseries Godless) captured the hearts of audiences, but spaghetti Westerns especially had rewritten the laws of the genre entirely. A Fistful of Dollars (1964) – a shot-for-shot remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) marked the dawn of a new age of cowboy pictures, spearheaded by Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Franco Nero. The new generation preferred a grittier, bloodier, and more unapologetic depiction of the Old West, contradicting the great works of Wayne, who came from an old generation of Western romantics.
John Wayne Refused To Star In An Eastwood Movie
