After having watched several western movies, telling all kind of stories, with different settings, I got surprised by one precious western: “The Shootist” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075213/ (1976, D. Siegel ). There’s always some risk to come across precious unexpected things. I started to watch it thinking “let’s watch Mr. Wayne’s last movie”. But it ended up being a movie to add to my list of favourite films. After having seen THE movie, I looked for some information and there were more things to come.
John Wayne (playing the role of John Bernard Books), Lauren Bacall and an unknown actor, who happened to become a famous movie director (“a beautiful mind”, “the da vinci code”, yes, Ron Howard is the young Gillom, the son of Bacall’s role of Mrs. Rogers, the guy who admires Mr. Books)...ah, and the horse Ole Dollor, as Ole Dollor. All of them in a film that seems too short but actually isn’t.
Mr. Books and John Wayne are both in “the shootist” in their last scenes, both of them because of stomach cancer, not a typical subject to appear in western movies. No more movies with John Wayne, no more John B. Books in any other movie because Mr. Wayne wouldn’t play him again. It’s said that the cause of such disease in Mr. Wayne dates back to the mid fifties, when he took part in the movie “the conqueror” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049092/ (1956, in Spanish it was translated to “el conquistador de Mongolia), a bad movie (well, it could be useful to see how distorted images of Mongolians and Genghis Khan could be), filmed somewhere in Utah were previously some nuclear tests had taken place (actually there’s some controversy about all this). In that movie John Wayne played the role of the Mongolian leader, not easy to believe, but in fact nowadays most movies are worse than this one may be.
I would have never said that there was some link between John Wayne, Genghis Khan and last days. Neither would I have thought of linking John Bernard Books and Mr. Kanji Watanabe (Shimura Takashi’s role in “ikiru”, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044741/ 1952, , Kurosawa) and their attitude in the last days. That ability to transcend the screen, transcend expressions, all the silly things we and the characters in movies worry about. Something in the way they uttered words and what they said transcended the screen and shake our contemporary silliness vigorously, our pretensions to be superior thanks to a progress that is taking our society a bit backwards, our belief in permanence and pseudo-eternities. Meanwhile, Ole Dollor ran away, weeping. Ole Dollor keeps running across minds. Ole Dollor will keep running and one day will become a winged creature.