The only western for which John Wayne broke his golden rule: “He reluctantly agreed”

John Wayne was a true legend of Hollywood for most of his career, although by the early 1970s he was already beginning to feel that his era had passed. Much of this came from the direction modern cinema was taking, increasingly distant from what he believed the seventh art should represent.

So much so that in one of his final films, Big Jake, a 1971 Western directed by George Sherman, with Wayne himself handling some scenes due to the director’s declining health at the time, the Duke broke one of his golden rules: avoiding explicit violence.

John Wayne and his golden rule in Hollywood

Wayne, deeply conservative in his personal views, strongly rejected explicit sex and graphic violence in films. He also reacted angrily to the idea of any implied homosexual representation on the big screen.

Within his favorite genre, he disliked the darker direction taken by his major rival, Clint Eastwood, and was particularly shocked by the increasingly violent Westerns of the era. In 1969, The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah, premiered, a Western Wayne considered excessively brutal and savage.

However, with Big Jake, he had to make an exception.

“I hadn’t directed a major film for a long time when Duke asked me if I’d like to do Big Jake,” Sherman recalled. Filming began in December 1970, eighteen months after the release of The Wild Bunch, and the director knew his film needed to adapt to modern trends, although its star needed time to accept the change.

“The biggest chance was the violence in films by 1970,” Sherman explained. “Duke disagreed with me on this, but I said we had to make the violence more realistic, because audiences had come to expect it. He reluctantly agreed.” Not only did he accept it, audiences were surprised by what they saw when Big Jake reached theaters.

As with most John Wayne films, Big Jake ends with a climactic shootout. This time, the actor abandoned a lifelong habit and agreed to his director’s request to raise the intensity, leading many critics and viewers to mock the final confrontation, calling it so bloody that it felt excessive.

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