Actor John Wayne is one of the greatest western stars of all time. But he didn’t like one movie from the genre he made big
When you think of westerns, you will often have an image of John Wayne in your head. The American became one of the genre’s biggest stars with films such as The Marshal, Rio Bravo and The Black Falcon. However, his fame did not mean that Wayne himself was a general lover of the film genre. For example, he couldn’t stand westerns for one particular reason
John Wayne found western classic The Wild Bunch too violent
According to Far Out Magazine, John Wayne spoke in a 1971 Playboy interview about not liking the genre classic The Wild Bunch because of the explicit violence:
To me, The Wild Bunch was in bad taste. Without the blood, it would have been a good movie. Movies go too far when they use that kind of realism, when blood spurts out and teeth fly, and when they throw a liver around to make it look like the insides of people. The Wild Bunch was one of the first to go that far in realism, and the curious came to see it.
Watch another trailer for The Wild Bunch here:
For the Western star, the power of imagination in cinema was more important than explicit depictions of violence:
This might lead bankers and stock promoters to believe that this is a necessary ingredient for successful motion pictures. They seem to forget the one basic principle of our business: illusion. We are in the magic business.
I don’t think it harms a child to see something that has the illusion of violence in it. All our fairy tales are about violence of some kind – the good knight rides to slay the dragon etc. Why do we need to show the knight spreading the snake’s entrails over the mountain of sweets?
