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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video and Paramount Pictures |
American film worker Don Siegel first started out as a
montage maker for films like Casablanca before moving on to making Academy
Award winning short films like Star in the Night and Hitler Lives and
soon began a feature filmmaking career that remains legendary to this day. Having directed everything from the original Invasion
of the Body Snatchers to not one but five features with Clint Eastwood
including Dirty Harry, Siegel never met a genre he couldn’t tackle. Already a skilled purveyor of the American
Western, it was only a matter of time before the Old Hollywood filmmaker during
his transition to what became known as New Hollywood of the 1970s that he would
cross paths with one of the genre’s most familiar faces: John Wayne.
In what ostensibly became the final film of the western
screen legend with his craggy voice, dim eyes and unmistakable personality on
full display, Don Siegel’s The Shootist based on Glendon Swarthout’s
novel for Wayne sort of functions as a Mackintosh and T.J. midwestern vehicle
that gives the actor ample room to give one final parting bow before leaving
the stage. In a role that hits close to
home for the actor and the audience, Wayne plays John Bernard Books whose
reputation as a master shootist of the Old West precedes him. But around 1901 Books comes down with cancer
as he slowly watches the Old West he knew fade away. To make matters worse, his gunslinging past
and news of his declining health attract the unwanted attention of past arch-rivals,
newsmen, a local undertaker and the marshal all wish to see him dead sooner
rather than later. But our aged hero isn’t
ready to go down without a fight just yet.
Handsomely lensed by longtime Don Siegel collaborator Bruce Surtees
and given a subtly moving score by Elmer Bernstein reminiscent of the recurring
anthem of courage permeating Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, The Shootist
is very much like Mackintosh and T.J. an ode to aging and the
protective passing of the torch from the old to the young. Featuring a star-studded cast of fellow
Hollywood legends Lauren Bacall, Jimmy Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine,
Scatman Crothers and even Ron Howard who garnered a Best Supporting Actor
Golden Globe nomination, the Paramount Pictures production is an ensemble piece
that is at once tense, tragic but somehow tender as well. It goes without saying John Wayne’s own
screen presence in the annals of the American Western remain largely unmatched
but here the aged actor comes across as vulnerable, aware of his past demons
and not looking for sympathy as he gradually accepts his mortality.
A bit lighter than your usual western with emphasis on
shifting social mores as well as not being able to completely escape your past
catching up to you, The Shootist is a paean to the then-fading Western
subgenre as well as a testament to the seismic screen presence of its leading
man that once was. While the film underperformed
somewhat at the box office, the film became an instant critical favorite and
was named one of the Ten Best Films of 1976 by the National Board of Review. Though only garnering an Academy Award
nomination for Art Direction, The Shootist is unmistakably John Wayne’s
film through and through.
Much like Jason Robards’ dying patriarch in Paul Thomas
Anderson’s Magnolia, Wayne’s own recurring health problems including but
not limited to remission for stomach cancer invariably factored heavily into
the role of an already fading legend.
While not the most action packed or innovative western programmer of its
day, there’s nevertheless something palpable and sincere in Wayne’s final
screen performance that absolutely merits viewing. Arrow Video’s limited deluxe blu-ray restored
in 2K exclusively for this release is great and the film remains an important
chapter in both John Wayne and director Don Siegel’s respective careers in a
film that is at once a straightforward adaptation of the novel as well as
farewell from one of the western genre’s most formidable icons.
--Andrew Kotwicki
