The Shootist

With some time to myself this afternoon I was going through the Tivo to see what I had recorded to watch. I started the movie Diner but fifteen minutes in realized that, at least today, I was not interested in teenagers in 1959 Baltimore. I gave Network some attention, this had Faye Dunaway( looking twenty years older than her role in Bonnie and Clyde ten years earlier ) and great reviews but a half hour in, that I will never get back, it seemed dated and frankly a little too inside the bubble for my tastes and that too was discarded.

As I took the television out of Tivo mode the channel had been left on AMC. Lo and behold what was just beginning but The Shootist. A 1976 movie known as John Wayne's last movie the film caught my interest and I watched the entire thing.

I have to say that I am not a huge Wayne fan but have enjoyed some of his movies. This movie was different. Centering as much on issues of mortality and dignity at the end of it this movie is stunningly strong. Watching the scene between the Doctor who confirms for the aging gunfighter Books that Wayne plays and realizing that in this very scene we see perhaps the two biggest screen actors of the last fifty years acting out a scene acknowledging mortality is very powerful. Jimmy Stewart as the Doctor gives one late example that he might well be incapable of a poor performance and Wayne is perfect in his role.

The cast in this movie was directed by Wayne. Wayne wanted Lauren Bacall who, playing the boarding house matron, is understated and thus uncommonly affective. The scene of Bacall and Wayne out for a Sunday drive is very well done. Ron Howard also appears in the movie as Gillam Rogers, son of Bacall's Bond Rogers. Howard is wonderful in the role, caught between little boy fantasies of gunfighters and wanting to protect his mother and his feelings of sadness at the pending demise of this figure from an old west that is ending as the twentieth century begins.

Wayne went so far as to have a part wrote into the movie for a specific horse. He wanted his favorite horse, Dollar, in the movie.

If your looking for a typical Wayne shoot them up movie this is not it. There are some gunfights at the climatic end but this movie is as much a thought piece on mortality and how it affects us all, even those of us who seem bigger than life and thus bigger than death. In the end none of us are as Wayne himself found out three years later when he died.

This is an excellent, and very underrated movie.