Hondo actor John Wayne had plenty of actors over the career he enjoyed working with. However, there were others that brought out a whole other side of him. Wayne detested his Hondo co-star, Geraldine Page, who he couldn’t stop complaining about. The men didn’t treat her well on the set, but she ultimately shocked her fellow cast members when she earned an Oscar nomination for her performance.

Hondo follows an Army dispatch rider named Hondo Lane (Wayne). He discovers a young mother named Angie Lowe (Page) and her son, Johnny (Lee Aaker), living near Apache warriors. However, Hondo finds himself having to become the mother and son’s protector as he travels across an isolated piece of land in Apache territory.

The 1953 film is based on Lous L’Amour’s short story “The Gift of Cochise” released the year prior. John Farrow directs from James Edward Grant’s screenplay, but John Ford also directed some final scenes.

Pilar Wayne and Alex Thorleifson’s John Wayne: My Life With the Duke told the frustrations Wayne had with his Hondo co-star, Page. However, he took it upon himself to act upon his complaints. Wayne was already on edge when Pilar couldn’t be on the set.

Page was a “New York-nurtured” stage actor, rather than the “movie star” type that Wayne was familiar with.
“She may have been great on Broadway, but she didn’t know a damn thing about making movies,” Wayne said. “I don’t know where some of these arty New York theater people get their manners. Would you believe she sat down at dinner one night and ate her mashed potatoes with her fingers?”
Wayne explained that Page “didn’t care much for makeup–or soap and water for that matter.” As a result of his frustrations over her table manners, he dumped his entire dinner plate over her head, shouting, “And I’m not sorry!”
Ford further provoked the situation when he forced Wayne and Page to reshoot a Hondo love scene. The filmmaker didn’t think that audiences could believe “a handsome man like Duke could be in love with such a homely woman.” Wayne responded, “Damn him. Shooting that scene the first time was bad enough.”
Wayne, Ford, and Farrow put Page in the situation where they added lines to make it more “believable” that the two characters would fall in love. “They told her to look into Duke’s eyes adoringly, and murmur, ‘I know I’m a homely woman, but I love you.’” Naturally, Page was angry with the trio of men.
Wayne had a rotten experience working on Hondo with Page. However, it really rubbed salt in the wound for him when she went on to earn her first Oscar nomination for her performance. She would lose the statue that year to Donna Reed in From Here to Eterenity.
Nevertheless, Page would continue with an impressive career with plenty more appearances at the Academy Awards. She would earn another six Oscar acting nominations over the next 30 years. Page received her first win for 1985’s The Trip to Bountiful.
Wayne and Page both only won a single Oscar over the course of their careers, but she certainly has him beat when it comes to nominations.
 
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John Wayne and His GunsWayne was an extra and played an unnamed American officer in the 1928 World War I silent film Four Sons, but he was never seen holding a firearm despite the film’s wartime setting. He continued to have bit parts, many of which were uncredited, until he starred in the 1930 film The Big Trail. Largely overlooked today, the film still deemed to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress in 2006 and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

It also marked the first time Wayne carried a firearm on screen; in this case an Enfield Pattern 1853, a percussion fired rifled musket that saw use in the Crimean War and later in the American Civil War. In the film, Wayne’s character—a young trapper and scout—also carried a Remington 1858 New Army. He never used either weapon again, however.

The Single Action ArmyOf the firearms that John Wayne used the most in movies, nothing even comes close to the Colt 1873 Single Action Army Revolver, which appeared in some 25 films. While not the first to use the infamous revolver in a movie – that would be the unnamed “Bandit” in 1903’s The Great Train Robbery – Wayne was arguably the first household name to use the Single Action Army in a film, it was in 1931’s The Range Feud.

Over the nearly five decades following that film, the Duke carried Single Action Army Revolvers. He carried them in such films as The Trail Beyond (1934), Red River (1948), Rio Grande (1950), Hondo (1953) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965).He also carried the revolver as Deputy U.S. Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn in his Oscar winning performance True Grit, as well as in the sequel Rooster Cogburn. It’s also fitting that his character carries a “Great Western Revolver”; it’s a specially engraved replica made especially for Wayne, in his final movie The Shootist (1976).

The Winchester Model 1892The Winchester Model 1892 was first seen in the 1939 film Stagecoach. Winchester’s rifle—notably the large lever loop version—has become practically synonymous with Wayne. The lever-action repeating rifle, which the legendary John Browning designed to be a smaller and lighter version of the large-frame Model 1886, is almost always an anachronism, but because of Wayne it was associated with Hollywood westerns for decades.
Wayne used the Winchester Model 1892 in a dozen films. The Saddle Ring Carbine version appeared about half of the time.
As with the Colt Single Action Army, Winchester’s rifle appeared in some of the Duke’s most remembered and beloved films. Those include Red River, The Searchers (1953), True Grit and The Shootist.
Only in a few films did Wayne ever use the more period correct rifles. A good example is the Winchester Model 1866 “Yellow Boy,” which appears in the 1948 film Fort Apache. Meanwhile, he used a Springfield Model 1873 Cavalry Carbine in Red River. However, those are the exceptions, and while not historically accurate, Wayne just seems correct carrying the Model 1892.
John Wayne With Military GunsIn addition to being known for playing U.S. Marshals and other lawmen—as well as gun fighters and cowboys—in countless westerns, Wayne’s character roster also included many war films. As noted, his first role was playing a U.S. military officer during the First World War. However, it was during the Second World War that he made the transition to portraying a modern soldier.
In 1944’s The Fighting Seabees, Wayne carried a Colt M1911A1 .45 pistol and Springfield M1903A3 rifle. Meanwhile, in 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima he first carried and actually fired an M1 Garand. Wayne carried the M1 Garand again, but never fired it in the 1962 World War II epic The Longest Day.
The Green BeretsBy the end of the 1960s, John Wayne had the somewhat dubious distinction of appearing in The Green Berets. It was the only Vietnam War film to have the full support of the U.S. military.
The film essentially comes off as a western with the Viet Cong taking the role of the American Indians attacking a besieged frontier outpost. In the film, Wayne carries an XM16E1; it’s the Army variant of the original M16 (SP1).
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Made in 1976, three years before he died, John Wayne’s last picture, The Shootist, in which he plays an aging cowboy dying of cancer, became a most appropriate swan song to his illustrious 50-year screen career.

Wayne was seemingly the natural, but not first, choice for the part. Surprisingly, the role had been first offered to Paul Newman, who reportedly pulled out for personal reasons. The part was then offered to George Scott, who demanded too many changes in the script. Both Newman (“The Sting”) and Scott (“Patton”) were very popular in the 1970

However, in retrospect, producer Mike Frankovich was delighted with the casting, claiming, “Nobody could have been better for the part than the Duke. He’s perfect.”

There were many advantages in casting Wayne as John Bernard Books, as director Don Siegel wanted to show the progression of the protagonist gunfighter from his early heroic and glorious days to his very tragic death. What better strategy to use than actually borrowing old clips from Wayne’s own great Westerns, Stagecoach, Red River, and Hondo, all cult films.

The movie thus became a self-conscious invocation of the Wayne screen, and an unintentional tribute to his lengthy career, as, among other things, the most significant screen image in Hollywood history. For some, who knew the actor was ill, it looked as if The Shootist had been consciously designed as an epitaph, though Wayne was planning at the time to continue making movies.
There were many parallels between the fictional narrative and Wayne’s personal life. John Bernard Books is dying of cancer, a theme that was unpalatable and unmentionable to many actors, but not to Wayne. “Hell, no. It means nothing to me,” he told an interviewer, “I’m a member of the club, after all.” However, Wayne refused to make cancer the film’s major concern and, accommodating his request, the subject was mentioned in the text just twice.
Moreover, the conversation between Wayne and the physician (played by Republican peer and Wayne pal Jimmy Stewart), confirming his fear of having cancer, was in harmony with his image. Stewart has the burden to inform Brooks the grim truth about cancer. Ahead of its time, the conversation even hints and suggests the possibility of suicide as a way of avoiding the growing and excruciating pain. Indeed, upon being told the bad news, an upset Wayne protests, “You told me I was strong as an ox,” to which Stewart’s doctor replies, “Even oxen die.”
At the center of the yarn is Wayne’s relationship with a widowed landlady, Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall), and her son, Gillom (Ron Howard). At first, Howard resents Wayne, but gradually he learns to respect him, admiring him for being “the most celebrated” shootist in the West. Howard, like other children in his films, learns how to behave properly by observing and emulating Wayne’s behavior.
For example, spying on Wayne from the window, he gets his first lesson, “If you want to see me, knock on the door, like a man.” Later, Wayne sums up his philosophy of life to Howard, deeming it useful to the younger generation: “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to others, and I require the same of them.”
When Howard asks for a shooting lesson, Wayne agrees but instructs him: “A man should know how to handle a gun–with discretion.” The film’s assumption, like Hondo,” is that every child, let alone an orphan, needs a sociological father in order to become a man. And, in similar manner to The Cowboys, Howard adopts his master’s style and philosophy. In the last scene, he avenges Wayne’s death in the saloon by using the latter’s gun, then throws it away.
With all my praise for its artistic and acting qualities, ideologically speaking, The Shootist also was one of Wayne’s most self-righteous and self-aggrandizing movies. At various scenes, he’s described as, “the most celebrated shootist in the West,” and as a gunslinger “who never killed a man who didn’t deserve it.”
As in the earlier and far inferior film, Big Jake, Wayne shows a self-conscious concern with his increasing age and the coming of modernization to the West–the movie takes place in Carson City circa 1901.
A man of the past, Wayne’s hero is out of place, an outsider not in tune with his times. When he first rides into town and obstructs the traffic, Brooks is told, not too gracefully, “Get out of the way, old man!”
In another scene, he is greeted as “Hey, Methuselah!” We also learn that the old, famous Queen Victoria is also and already dead. The Queen like Wayne the actor and Brooks the character, is a symbol of the past. Wayne says he likes the Queen, because she had dignity: “She’s the kind of gal I’d like to meet.”
Moreover, when Serpeta (Sherre North), a woman of his past, unexpectedly comes to visit him and suggests they get married so that she can gain some money from writing a book about him after his death, Brooks calls her bluff, claiming, “I won’t be remembered for a pack of lies.” However, as real and old-fashioned gentleman, Brooks gives her money for her travel and sends her back home.
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