The Big Picture

  • John Wayne criticized Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter for its dark and satanic depiction of the Old West.
  • Eastwood defended his film, stating that it was meant to be a fable and not a historical portrayal of pioneering.
  • Wayne's animosity towards Eastwood's revisionist Westerns reflects a generational divide and his commitment to preserving the mythology of the genre.

When playing the word association game, the two names that immediately jump to mind when the word "Westerns" is spoken are John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Naturally, one must assume that at some point, particularly in the former's later years, the two stars shared the screen. Unfortunately, this dream proposition never came to be. These icons, instead of facing off in a pistol duel in the old West, were entangled in an off-screen feud initiated by Wayne. As the original face of the Western genre, he did not hold favorable opinions of the new gunslinger riding into town in Eastwood.

Clint Eastwood Was Becoming a Western Star

Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates on 'Rawhide'
Image via CBS

When Eastwood emerged as a major movie star in the early 1970s, Wayne's glory days were behind him. At the 1970 Academy Awards, Wayne was honored with his first-ever Oscar for True Grit — a career achievement of sorts that the awards body is prone to give out. On the flip side, Eastwood was steadily climbing up the ladder to stardom, starting on TV with Rawhide, morphing into an international star with Sergio Leone's "Dollars" Trilogy, all of which would lead to the role that would cement his legendary status: Harry Callahan.

Thanks to the acclaimed original Dirty Harry movie and its four sequels through the next decade, Eastwood was molded into a cultural icon representing masculinity, noble anti-heroism, and the arbiter of justice — mirroring the iconography of Wayne. With his contributions to Westerns, including the 1968 film Hang 'Em High and the 1973 film High Plains Drifter which he also directed, the actor was destined to take the mantle from Wayne as the new face of the genre. In an alternate universe, the latter of the two films, which was Eastwood's second bid as a director, could have been a proper passing of the torch between the old guard and the new face.

John Wayne Criticized Clint Eastwood's 'High Plains Drifter'

High Plains Drifter, which follows a mysterious gun-fighter (Eastwood) hired by a local town to defend its people against three violent outlaws, is a dark, revisionist examination of the cowboy figure that audiences were trained to cheer for throughout the history of Hollywood. The outlaw justice that Eastwood's Stranger character delivers to the town in the film is satanic, blurring the line between good and evil. Unforgiven, which is considered the pinnacle of revisionist Western mythmaking, was not the first time that the star reconsidered the supposed heroism at the heart of cowboy icons.

Wayne, a traditionalist in his view of good vs. evil and the upstanding role of Western protagonists, was disgusted by Eastwood's depiction of the Old West. After the film's release, Wayne sent Eastwood a scathing letter, stating that "it wasn’t really about the people who pioneered the West," according to Eastwood. This letter was sent directly in response to Eastwood's proposal to Wayne to star together in a film. Wayne was offered a chance to star with him in The Hostiles, an abandoned project that would hypothetically feature Eastwood playing a young gambler who wins a large portion of an old man's estate. The closest that Eastwood ever got to working with Wayne was when his frequent collaborator and filmmaking mentor, Don Siegel, directed The Duke in his final screen performance in 1976, The Shootist.

John Wayne Wanted to Protect the Integrity of the Western

John Wayne as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers
Image via Warner Bros.

In his defense of the meaning behind his 1973 film, Eastwood wrote "High Plains Drifter was meant to be a fable. It wasn’t meant to show the hours of pioneering drudgery. It wasn’t supposed to be anything about settling the west," in his book Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western. In an additional response to Wayne's criticisms, he further stated that he "realized that there’s two different generations, and he (Wayne) wouldn’t understand what I was doing." This speaks to the personal burden that John Wayne carried with the genre which he helped mold into what it is today.

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In essence, the actor's films were used as a vessel to uphold his staunch conservative beliefs. From Wayne's perspective, Westerns are designed to appease the binary mentality of good vs. evil. Eastwood has never been interested in this shallow characterization and thematic structure, even with his most populous movies. Eastwood's response to Wayne's critiques of High Plains Drifter seems to be self-evident. For Wayne, however, Westerns were not fables. He enacted a duty to champion the purity of America and the pioneering of the Old West. His politics and stardom were one and the same, and the protection of the mythology of the West on screen was a self-appointed duty.

Wayne's animosity toward Eastwood's bleak deconstruction of the new frontier is nothing short of ironic considering his illustrious collaboration with director John Ford. The legendary filmmaker, similar to Wayne, found a comfort zone in telling fabled stories about the historical ramifications of the founding of the country in the context of Westerns. Ford-Wayne films like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are meditatively revisionist of the values of Western heroes, exploring the perverse tendencies of obsessive justice and the outright mythmaking of celebrated folk heroes, respectively.

Clint Eastwood and John Wayne Had Different Beliefs

Particularly seen in Ford's films without Wayne's presence, such as The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, his vision of a pastiche America was riddled with deep melancholy and lacking any intended nostalgia. Eastwood was quite fond of the director's work, and Ford's DNA can be traced in many of his films beyond Westerns. The difference between the two lies in their respective manner of storytelling. Ford, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, was graceful in reconsidering the nobility of American icons. Eastwood pushed the envelope in deglamorizing outlaw vigilantes who ride into town offering justice — to the extent of making the characters he plays hinge on nihilism.

Since Wayne's passing in 1979, Eastwood has taken the mantle as the face of idealistic masculinity and patriotism in the eyes of conservative America. Despite various conceptions surrounding his political beliefs, there is no denying the impact that he made on his specific brand of American exceptionalism. From John Wayne's point of view, Eastwood was a demoralizing spirit to the integrity of America as a result of artistically contaminating an essential form of American storytelling in the Western. Who would've thought that the man behind Dirty Harry could be characterized as a radical anti-American artist?

This sentiment could only arise from someone like Wayne, whose politics blinded him from great art. The story of the unexpected animosity carried out by Wayne towards Eastwood is a study of a generational divide. At the time when Wayne penned his critiques of High Plains Drifter, the nation was in the midst of social upheaval. Eastwood represented the change, in conjunction with the emergence of New Hollywood in that decade, that deconstructed the values that America truly stood for. Wayne could only help but be baffled by the star's nerve to shape the Western protagonist as anything more nuanced than a propagandized folk superhero. In the end, Clint Eastwood stood the test of time as a proper evolution of Wayne — one who could be an idealistic image of an American while simultaneously reexamining the kind of violence that the country was founded upon.