John Wayne turned down the chance to work with Clint Eastwood on a Western simply because he hated Eastwood's much darker takes on the old West.
In the history of American Westerns, no two figures are as tall as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, yet when they got the chance to work on a movie together in the 1970s, it was Wayne who vehemently turned it down. The reasoning behind his decision had as much to do with Eastwood's star persona and the changing landscape of the Western genre as he did with the film in question.
John Wayne was one of the first great stars of the West. He emerged during the 1930s, just as synchronized sound movies were totally replacing silent movies. Wayne was the face of an era of Westerns where the genre dominated the film landscape and films like John Ford's. Chivalry Trilogy glorified certain ideals of the time such as black-and-white morality, American exceptionalism, and a positive view of Manifest Destiny. Wayne's later films like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance added nuance to his personality, but he never strayed too far from these ideals. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, a new era arrived. Heralded by Italian films such as Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy, these newer Westerns were darker and more violent and began to feature a greater amount of moral ambiguity and often used their themes to question long-held American beliefs. The face of this new era was Clint Eastwood, who became almost as big a star as John Wayne in his prime.
It was at the beginning of the 1970s when an attempt was made to unite these two eras of the West through the two actors who most embodied them. Larry Cohen, a director known for B movies like The Stuff and Q: The Winged Serpent, wrote a script for a western called The Hostiles. The script centered on a gambler winning half of an older man's estate, and the idea was that Eastwood would play the gambler and Wayne the older man. Eastwood was interested, but Wayne flatly turned the role down. He didn't like the script, but even more than that, he didn't like Clint Eastwood as a director and actor or how the script reflected new trends in the Western genre. After Eastwood tried again to pitch the film to Wayne, Wayne responded with a letter explaining his reasoning. In the letter, a major point of contention was how much Wayne hated Eastwood's recent film. Wanderer of the High Plains.
High Plains Wanderer was a 1973 western in which Eastwood starred, and it was his first to direct. It's an incredibly dark and violent movie that often reads like a critique of the Old West, or at least a very cynical portrayal of it. Wayne hated it and thought it did not adequately reflect the lives of, in his opinion, noble pioneers who settled west and expanded America's frontiers. He viewed The Hostiles as more in line with the spaghetti westerns that made Eastwood famous. For him, the script was a cynical reinterpretation of the kinds of characters and stories that Wayne's most famous films often portrayed. Eastwood did not bother to reply to the letter.
Needless to say, Hostiles was never made because of this. A version of Cohen's script was eventually made into the 2009 TV movie The Gambler, the Girl, and the Gunslinger, but the world was never going to see the two giants of the genre together on screen. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood just came through different generations and different eras of Hollywood, and both had very different ideas about the genre that made their careers. They are icons and will always be the faces of both sides of the West: its older traditions and its newer deconstructions.
