The Shootist (1976): An Unbelievably Sad Western

Hot take: cancer sucks

I watch movies and YouTube videos while I work out alone in my garage. Most people listen to music when they lift, usually metal or gangsta rap. I get it—I do have such a playlist but I haven’t used it in a while. And when I was at a gym years ago, I blasted Lamb of God through my headphones to drown out the horrible crap they played. But the way my brain works, it’s better for me to watch old World’s Strongest Man competitions or Kung Fu flicks while I’m working out. On Thursday, I felt in the mood for a dumb old Western—something easy to follow while half paying attention to it—so I searched through Kanopy¹ looking for a classic, and came across The Shootist, a John Wayne film I’d never seen, and put it on.

There was a lil gunplay in the film, but not much.

Now John Wayne has made some good films, but for the most part, I think he’s a bore. I loved The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and really liked True Grit, but there wasn’t much there for me otherwise. The bulk of his career was really in the ‘30s and ‘40s while working for the studio system, cranking out one movie after another—these movies are often really hokey and heavy handed. And then there are some movies that don’t hold up culturally at all, like The Conqueror, in which he plays Genghis Kahn. He was a huge star for 40 years until his death, but he’s mostly out of the public mind now. It’s mostly old film nerds like me who even know who he is—try asking anyone you know who was born after his death in 1979 if they can name a film of his.

Point is, I wasn’t expecting anything from this film, especially in the late era of John Wayne when he was half-heartedly reading his lines from cue cards before returning to his trailer. There’s the unintentionally hilarious McQ, which he took after he turned down Dirty Harry² and saw it was a huge hit—he personally disliked Eastwood, and couldn’t stand being a lesser star—in which he’s so stiff and immobile he can barely get out of his car. Most of the problem with this stage of films is that Wayne delivers lines like people did in the 1930s, and in the 70s, it stuck out really badly. But then this sad cowboy film came over the Kindle.

The Shootist is a cancer movie. More than a Western, it’s a cancer flick set in the Old West. I haven’t been this blindsided since, as a grade-schooler, I watched Brian’s Song on TV because I thought it was a football movie. Which is also a cancer movie. Or like Love Story, in which it’s not about love, it’s really about cancer.

And here’s what sucks about cancer: given a long enough timeline, everyone will get it and probably die from it. I don’t care how healthy you live, if you avoid all the chaotic elements like getting hit by a bus and if you don’t choke on your shrimp at Olive Garden, you end up getting cancer and dying. UGH. I watched my clean-living mother die of it and know a vegan who got stomach cancer and died in her 30s. I knew a guy named Big Pete who had a bad cough, went to a doctor, and found out he had less than a month to go.

So pardon me if I don’t want to spend additional time staring at a fictional portrayal of cancer because it just makes me feel worse. But I had started it, and I really needed to see how it ended. And it was a bummer. You know that scene in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid when Slim Pickens is shot in the gut and he knows it’s a fatal wound and he’s going to die and there’s nothing he can do about it but accept it and sit with it and tell his wife he’s sorry? It’s like that, but the whole fucking time.

John Wayne plays an old gunslinger who’s dying of prostate cancer and he only has a few weeks left to live. So he finds a boarding house and tries to wait it out. It’s set at the end of the Old West era, when what we thought of as those days transitioned into the Gay ‘90s. So the context in which his life makes sense is disappearing as he spends his last few days—just like John Wayne’s real life at the time.

The Shootist was Wayne’s last film, and he died of stomach cancer a few years later. I assume he was really sick as well in this role. Hollywood had changed drastically, and there was no place for him in popular culture anymore. His films were like 5 o’clock dinners—they only sounded good to seniors. This was more the decade for Rocky, Star Wars, and Jaws. In the film, he’s supported by Jimmy Stewart and Lauren Bacall, while he watches the kid—Ron Howard—follow in his wake.

And Jesus H. Kubrick, I found myself feeling sorry not for the lead character, but for John Wayne himself. The man had lived long enough to watch his success become irrelevant. Like him or not, as a creative person, this is a nightmare.

Creative people all think of how we’re received, and in the backs of our superegos, we think about how long our art will last—how will I be remembered after I’m dead? Will my books become better known? Will the public at large finally “get me” and make my work popular? If we’re lucky enough, we see success in our lifetimes, maybe get things going right near the end, and enjoy a few years of adoration—think of how Cormac McCarthy was only known to book nerds until The Road and No Country for Old Men—the man had a nice final act. Or will it be frustration to the last moment, like the old legend of crime writer Jim Thompson whose last words are rumored to be to his wife: “just you wait, in ten years, I’ll be famous!”

I’m not recommending this film, unless you’re a curious completionist like myself. If you want to watch a Western, I’ll recommend Invitation to a Gunfighter or the original 3:10 to Yuma. Or High Noon or Tin Star. Well, maybe a Western list should be next. Watch this space!

Yee haw!

1. Kanopy and Hoopla have a lot of great old Westerns. After that, Prime has some great ones.

2. FRANK SINATRA was originally the lead. But then he got hurt, and dropped out. Wayne didn’t want to take one of his cast-offs out of pride. But imagine this film with Frank!