In a certain kind of better world, you can kill thirty people, be certain they all deserved it, and still come off as a really good guy instead of a psychopath. That's the world in which the curtain closed on the John Wayne archetype in 1976's The Shootist, John Wayne's last film, made just three years before his death*. It's not a bad movie but it's more of a celebration of what people generally thought was great about John Wayne's movies than what was actually great about them. It's a cosy, elegiac little daydream.
Wayne plays a notorious gunfighter named J.B. Books who comes to Carson City in 1901 on a day newspapers are reporting the death of Queen Victoria. He soon learns he's not long for the world himself as his friend and doctor, Hostetler (James Stewart), confirms a diagnosis from another doctor that Books has inoperable cancer.
Stewart's pairing with Wayne reminds one of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance where the two represented two sides of a mythical American spirit--Stewart on the side of the social contract and its benefit for all and Wayne representing an instinctual code of individualism enforced by fists and guns. That was a John Ford movie, and like The Searchers, another movie Ford made with Wayne, there's a recognition that the kind of lifestyle led by the John Wayne archetype was far from perfect and deciding who ought to live or die was never simple.
But The Shootist was directed by Don Siegel who made Dirty Harry and Madigan, a director who very much had faith in the idea of one good man with a gun versus the whole world, and in that Wayne may have found himself in more comfortable company than he did with John Ford. But the naivete inherent in this world view makes for a far less satisfying film.
What Wayne and Siegel, and maybe fans of Wayne's, take from the Ford film is the sense of isolation, the sense of the lone fellow who's honed an incredible skill for survival in a world that rejects his ideology. The woman in The Shootist isn't quite the annoying misogynist portrait that characterises the women in Siegel's other films but I think it's entirely due to the fact that she's played by Lauren Bacall.
Even so, one senses her character's never able to wrap her head around the violent grandeur other characters feel to be self-evident about Books. Her main contribution seems to be in staying out of his way and not completely hating him.
Her son, Gillom, played by Ron Howard, idolises Books and wants the older man to teach him how to shoot. Books gives some lip service to the idea that young Gillom shouldn't grow up to be like him but by the end the movie can't help undercutting this message.
The film's final shoot-out, where a bunch of two dimensional villains obligingly show up, takes place in an absolutely gorgeous saloon.
I've been trying to find out if it's a real place--I'd love to visit. Dig the designs carved into the bar and all the green and black art nouveau everywhere.
*I just learned John Wayne died exactly two months after I was born. I guess there wasn't room for both of us in the world.
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