(Source: Far Out / Warner Bros.)
Comfortable in his status as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, John Wayne became increasingly outspoken as his career progressed. His political views are as closely intertwined with his personality as the mythology he built around himself on screen by playing countless steadfast and stoic heroes.
As his time in the spotlight came to an end in the 1970s, The Duke regularly lamented what the industry had become. New Hollywood was on the rise, and the explosion of taboo-breaking and boundary-pushing stories told by a new generation of writers left a bitter aftertaste.
Two decades Before that, however, Wayne was the most staunch anti-communist in Hollywood. He openly and actively denounced the perceived influence of the party on the business he cared so much about, which not only led him to turn down the lead role in an Oscar-winning classic, but presents his own version in response.
The Duke was not the only one who turned down the role of Will Kane in Twelve noon before Gary Cooper stepped in and won an Oscar for Best Actor. Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Charlton Heston also turned down the opportunity, but Wayne was the only one to turn it down for political reasons.
The story is about a former marshal who leaves his small-town life behind to start a new life with his bride. It was extremely controversial at the time because of its allegorical references to the communist witch hunt. Screenwriter Carl Foreman was one of the names blacklisted in the 1950s because of suspected links to the party.
Wayne strongly criticized the film as un-American. The subplot in which a sheriff asks the locals for help in protecting their homeland from an outside threat raised suspicions that the film had communist undertones. The hero, on the other hand, was not a rough, tough guy in the classic Western style, but an everyman who realized that if he went into battle as a one-man army with a six-shooter, he would end in death and defeat.
Wayne and Cooper may have been friends, but the Duke said he would “never regret helping to run Foreman out of the country” when Hollywood’s fears of communism were at their highest. However, he was at least respectful enough to accept Cooper’s Oscar on his behalf.
Their bond may have caused Wayne’s problems with Twelve noonbut he still refused to accept it. Seven years later, The Duke headlined Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravowhose plot was very similar. In his western, the actor, John T. Chance, is a small-town sheriff who must fend off a threat, but he does so by assembling a ragtag crew and taking on the attackers in a more combative manner.
Whereas Twelve noon ended with the townspeople praising Kane after he refused to help him – an indication of how many industry figures remained silent until the blacklist was over – Rio Bravo was cut from more conventional cloth, portraying Wayne’s protagonist as an unstoppable force, an immovable object, and a unifying hero who gets the job done and saves the day with a minimum of fuss.
Rio Bravo celebrates the strength of the individual, of law enforcement officers who take matters into their own hands, and of the few who protect the many. The message was neither subtle nor overtly political. Given Wayne’s well-known disdain for Twelve noon and the subtext that irritated him so much, it is significant that just a few years later he came up with a spiritual successor that thematically turned the tables to give The Duke another opportunity to indulge his penchant for Western archetypes that oozed iron-clad Americana from every pore.
