Regarding true heroes of the western movie genre, it’s hard to look beyond the genre’s two most prominent and enduring icons: John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. While Wayne dominated the plains and prairies from the 1930s through the 1960s, he unwillingly handed over the reins to Eastwood, who would become the undisputed gunslinging king.
The two actors, known for their respective fiery attitudes, were no big fans of one another, though, and they endured an ongoing rivalry, which mostly came from the ever-vitriolic Wayne. Their feud largely occurred as a result of the Eastwood-starring 1973 western movie High Plains Drifter, directed by Ernest Tidyman.
“John Wayne once wrote me a letter saying he didn’t like High Plains Drifter,” Eastwood once noted in the book John Wayne: The Life and Legend. “He said it wasn’t really about the people who pioneered the West. I realised that there’s two different generations, and he wouldn’t understand what I was doing. It wasn’t meant to show the hours of pioneering drudgery. It wasn’t supposed to be anything about settling the West.”
Even though Wayne was clearly no fan of Eastwood’s work, Eastwood still decided to send him a screenplay that he was interested in and was also keen to get Wayne on board in the process. The Hostiles was written by B-movie legend Larry Cohen, known for directing The Stuff and Q: The Winged Serpent.
The film was about a gambler who wins half the estate of an older man, leading the two to work together even though they share a distaste for one another. Eastwood had wanted to play the gambler opposite Wayne as the old man, but Wayne was not interested in the slightest, mostly because of the way he’d previously perceived High Plains Drifter.
Eastwood proposed the film to Wayne on two occasions. When the script arrived the second time, handed to Wayne by his son Mike, The Duke’s response was to throw it in the water, announcing, “This piece of shit again”.
“This kind of stuff is all they know how to write these days,” Wayne had once said of The Hostiles, according to The Life and Legend. “The sheriff is the heavy; the townspeople a bunch of jerks. Someone like me and Eastwood ride into town, know everything, act the big guys, and everyone else is a bunch of idiots.”
Eventually, The Hostiles was made into the television movie The Gambler, the Girl, and the Gunslinger, released in 2009. The film flew well under the radar, but perhaps if Eastwood had teamed up with his fellow western icon Wayne, it might just have been a hit. However, the pair never got the chance to work together due to Wayne’s insistence.