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It’s also the only Western to cast a fading icon as a gunfighter dying of the same disease that would later claim him.
Fifty years ago today, on July 21, 1976, a legendary Western opened in theaters, and its aging star was quietly saying goodbye. On screen he plays J.B. Books, a famous gunfighter who rides into Carson City, Nevada, at the dawn of the 20th century after learning he is dying of cancer. Off screen, the man playing him had already survived the same disease once, and it would later return to take him within three years.
The star is John Wayne, and The Shootist would be his final film. Almost everything about it reads now like a farewell arranged in advance.
It opens with a bold trick most viewers forget. Before the story even starts, the film plays a black-and-white montage built from clips of Wayne's own earlier Westerns, among them Red River and Rio Bravo, standing in for Books' younger days. Narrated in part by Ron Howard's character, the sequence is framed as the gunfighter's violent past, yet the footage is lifted straight from the actor's real filmography, showing the star decades younger. The character's backstory and Wayne's own career become one and the same reel.
A Farewell Hiding in Plain Sight
The mirror runs deeper than any script could plan. Wayne had lost a lung to cancer back in 1964 and had been living in its shadow ever since. Cast as a man given only weeks to live, he took the role knowing exactly what it echoed. He died of cancer-related complications on June 11, 1979, at age 72. Fans have long called The Shootist the perfect way for the Duke to say farewell to the big screen.
Director Don Siegel, fresh off directing Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood, surrounded Wayne with a gallery of fading legends. James Stewart plays the doctor who delivers the grim diagnosis, a role that turned painfully real in hindsight. Lauren Bacall is the widow who takes Books in, Ron Howard her star-struck son, with Richard Boone, John Carradine, Harry Morgan, and Scatman Crothers filling out the frame. Elmer Bernstein, who scored The Magnificent Seven, wrote the elegiac music.
Critics understood what they were watching. Rotten Tomatoes' critics' consensus still describes the film as a fittingly elegiac swan song for one of Hollywood's most iconic stars, and Collider later ranked Books the fourth-greatest character of Wayne's entire career. The Academy, oddly, barely noticed, handing the film a single nomination for Best Art Direction and nothing at all for its leading man.
Half a century on, that omission still stings. The Shootist grossed around $13.4 million and endures as one of the most self-aware goodbyes any movie star ever staged. It still holds up as a farewell built to last.
