Clint Eastwood And John Wayne’s Feud, Explained

We might obtain a fee on purchases produced from hyperlinks.

Film stars do not get a lot greater than Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. Each belong to an age the place film stars have been extra than simply well-liked actors who may reliably promote tickets. The Duke particularly represented the human embodiment of an ideology. He was extra than simply an avatar for conservative beliefs, he was in some ways the face of a monoculture that merely would not exist any extra; a image of a society organized round shared beliefs which disintegrated because the century wore on. Eastwood rose to fame within the ’70s, the place tradition was rather more fractured than it had been in Wayne’s heyday. However he was about as shut as you would get to what his forbear represented within the first half of the twentieth Century, particularly when it got here to the Western style.

Each Eastwood and the Duke minimize their enamel on Oaters, establishing their enduring star energy by means of horseback battles and a stoic machismo that ensured they turned emblems of masculinity for total generations. Whereas an on-screen assembly between the 2 appeared like a foregone conclusion, then, these two Western titans really by no means got here face-to-face in any movie.

Most of that got here right down to the truth that Wayne merely wasn’t a fan of Eastwood’s extra cynical, deconstructionist Westerns. It was this that led to a rift between the pair that lasted till the Duke’s passing in 1979. Eastwood had some clashes in his time (his feud with Spike Lee got so bad Steven Spielberg had to step in). However his points with Wayne represented one thing a lot deeper — a conflict of generations. This is the whole lot it’s worthwhile to know in regards to the feud between Wayne and Eastwood and why we by no means noticed these legends star reverse each other.

Earlier than he turned a display legend John Wayne was only a younger school scholar and soccer participant who helped out with props on film units. It was throughout these early years that he met director John Ford who he literally knocked over during their first encounter and who would ultimately forged Wayne in his seminal 1939 Western “Stagecoach.” Whereas there was a subversive ingredient to the movie, which undermined lots of the well-established tropes of the style by revealing its archetypal characters as extra layered and complicated people, it was nonetheless very a lot of a pre-revisionist age — an age for which Wayne himself turned emblematic.

All through the following three a long time, the Duke turned a logo of simplistic good vs. evil Western storytelling. He wasn’t simply starring in Oaters, however they have been his bread and butter and he stays synonymous with the Western style to at the present time. The identical is considerably true of Clint Eastwood, who equally made his title by enjoying cowboys and outlaws. However the films Eastwood was making have been very completely different to these top-lined by his predecessor.

His function as Rowdy Yates in CBS’ Nineteen Sixties sequence “Rawhide” made him a TV star, and was the closest Eastwood got here to portraying the identical morally simple characters inhabited by Wayne. By the point he performed the Man with No Title in Sergio Leone’s celebrated “{Dollars}” trilogy, nevertheless, he was embracing a way more advanced anti-heroic ethos which got here to outline his Western output over the following few a long time — culminating in 1992 with what’s arguably the quintessential revisionist Western, “Unforgiven.” Although Wayne wasn’t round for that early-’90s triumph, he was round to witness Eastwood’s rise as a pioneer of the revisionist Western, and he wasn’t a fan.

After Clint Eastwood made the bounce from TV to the massive display with 1964’s “A Fistful of {Dollars}” he began to grow to be the face of a style present process a dramatic shift. Westerns historically embraced a simple good guys vs. unhealthy guys ethos, and John Wayne was on the forefront of it. Eastwood’s Western protagonists have been rather more morally questionable and that was notably true of 1973’s “Excessive Plains Drifter.”

By this level, Eastwood had starred in Don Siegel’s celebrated (and controversial) 1971 crime thriller “Dirty Harry.” With “High Plains Drifter” (which hit Netflix in 2025) the actor as soon as once more performed a morally questionable hero within the type of The Stranger, a mysterious determine who arrives within the Outdated West city of Lago and metes out his personal cruel type of justice. The film was an early directorial effort from Eastwood, who infused the movie with the identical revisionist ethos that had characterised his Sergio Leone collaborations, however turned the whole lot as much as 10, deconstructing the cowboy archetype that Wayne had been so pivotal in establishing.

Maybe unsurprisingly, then, Wayne wrote Eastwood an angry letter over “High Plains Drifter” wherein he chastised the younger actor for what he claimed was an inaccurate portrayal of the American West. In a 1992 Los Angeles Instances interview, Eastwood recalled Wayne writing, “That is not what the West was all about. That is not the American individuals who settled who settled this nation.” The actor mirrored on receiving the Duke’s missive, saying “I spotted that there is two completely different generations, and he would not perceive what I used to be doing. ‘Excessive Plains Drifter’ was meant to be a fable: it wasn’t meant to point out the hours of pioneering drudgery. It wasn’t speculated to be something about settling the West.”

The Seventies have been a captivating time for the Western, starting with controversial acid Western “El Topo” and ending with the hopeless Arnold Schwarzenegger-led Western flop “The Villain.” Throughout this transformative decade, Clint Eastwood not solely established himself as a star, he established the revisionist Western because the de facto type of the style. 

It is no marvel, then, that John Wayne refused to join Eastwood in what would have been a thrilling team-up. Together with Bob Barbash, author/director Larry Cohen co-wrote a script for the duo entitled “The Hostiles,” which might have seen Eastwood play a gambler who wins half a ranch. The opposite half was owned by an outdated gunslinger, who would have been portrayed by Wayne. Sadly, as Cohen informed writer Michael Doyle, author of “Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters,” Wayne recoiled when provided the prospect to star reverse Eastwood within the characteristic. Such a movie would have represented Wayne formally anointing the younger star as his successor, however the Duke merely wasn’t .

A final ditch try on Cohen’s half concerned sending his screenplay to Wayne’s son, Michael, who handed it to his father throughout a fishing journey. Because the screenwriter recalled: 

“The next week, I acquired Michael on the cellphone and requested him what had occurred. He mentioned, ‘Nicely, Dad was sitting on the boat and I handed him the script. He checked out it for a couple of minutes after which mentioned, ‘This piece of s*** once more!’ After which he threw it overboard.’ I quietly thought to myself, ‘Oh, there goes my stunning script, slowly sinking beneath the blue Pacific together with the hopes and goals of Clint Eastwood and Bob Barbash!'”

As “John Wayne: The Life and Legend” writer Scott Eyman wrote, “[Wayne] was delicate in regards to the drift towards nihilism and doubtless felt just a little threatened.” By the Seventies Wayne’s time was coming to an finish and he absolutely felt the tectonic cultural shift that turned his simplistic Western method right into a relic. He’d additionally fought most cancers and even had a lung eliminated, to not point out the very fact he was certainly one of many actors who’d damaged their bodies forever, pushing through immense pain to make a lot of his Seventies movies.

That might be sufficient to make the display legend cautious of this teen, Clint Eastwood. However Wayne also kicked off the ’70s by turning down the lead role in “Dirty Harry,” a call he late lamented. In Michael Munn’s guide “John Wayne: The Man Behind The Myth,” the star is quoted as saying, “I believed Harry was a rogue cop. I noticed the image, and I spotted that Harry was the form of half I would performed typically sufficient — a man who lives inside the legislation however breaks the foundations when he actually has to so as to save others.”

When Wayne labored with Don Siegel on 1976’s “The Shootist,” the “Soiled Harry” director made a serious error when he informed Wayne to shoot a villain within the again as a result of it is what Clint Eastwood would do. As Eastwood recalled on an episode of Inside the Actors Studio, “Wayne turned blue and he mentioned, ‘I do not care what that child would have executed, I do not shoot him within the again.'” Curiously sufficient, Eastwood ended up visiting the set of “The Shootist,” marking it as not solely Wayne’s remaining on-screen efficiency however the one and solely time the 2 titans of the Western style ever met.