Don Siegel’s 1976 western The Shootist stars John Wayne in his final film appearance, though it’s perhaps just as notable for the muted nature of its regard for the pathology of violence. After all, Siegel is the same filmmaker who half a decade prior made Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood’s renegade cop relishes squeezing the trigger of his 44-magnum revolver whenever the opportunity presents itself.
There’s a propulsive mania to Siegel’s direction of Dirty Harry, tapping as it does into the curious overlap between Harry’s police tactics and a psycho sniper’s bloodlust. Wayne’s J.B. Books in The Shootist has no such compelling correlate. He’s a former sheriff turned gunslinger, now an old man easing the pain of his terminal cancer with swigs of laudanum, and he’s aiming to die in peace. It’s 1901, and the fact that he can’t slip into anonymity at a Carson City boarding house owned by Bond (Lauren Bacall) is owed to his legacy as a gunfighter, which Bond’s teenage son, Gillom (Ron Howard), gobbles up with fascination.
Siegel leisurely establishes Books’s arrival in Carson City and the excitement of Gillomn shooting off at the mouth to locals about how there’s finally some action in town. We even get a couple of drawn-out scenes in which Books visits with Dr. Hostetler (James Stewart), who explains that nothing can be done about Books’s condition aside from minimizing his pain.
Much of the tension in The Shootist concerns whether Books will be pushed to violence again before his demise. Across scenes that sketch a tender father-son relationship between Books and Gillion, the old-timer teaches the whippersnapper how to handle a pistol responsibly, and in the process Books reveals a reciprocal code of ethics regarding violence that essentially amounts to a twist on the golden rule. There’s a striking similarity to the relationship between these two characters and the one between Van Heflin and Brandon deWilde’s characters in Shane, and not unlike that George Stevens classic, The Shootist finds Books eventually setting out for a saloon where a few men wait to settle their differences with him through gunfire.
The Shootist is caught between competing desires to both condemn violent retribution and allow Wayne one last chance to play up his star image as a surly cowboy who’s ultimately got a little more good in him than bad. It lacks the intricate texture of place and character, as well as the moral complexity, of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence—a film that it practically begs for comparison to, partly because the screenplay by Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale doesn’t present Wayne’s antihero with any convincing scenarios to challenge his ethical certitude.
Books’s spats with Bond, who abhors Books’s chosen profession, are rooted less in philosophical differences than plot machinations and her uncomplicated desire to shake Gillom from his burgeoning fantasies of gunfighter glory. Predictably, Books’s resolution to draw his guns for the last time ropes Gillom into the fray, forcing him to pull a weapon in Books’s defense. And while there’s a certain poignancy to the film’s insistence that violence is cyclical, passed from one generation to the next like some blood-soaked baton, these are notions that play unexacting in Siegel’s hands, flatly parroting convictions that were delivered with more exigency and inventiveness in numerous revisionist westerns from the preceding 15-odd years.
Image/Sound
The transfer of The Shootist on this Blu-ray release is a 2K remaster sourced from the original 35mm camera negative, and it suffers by comparison to other recent UHD releases of westerns such as Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Paint Your Wagon for its lack of pinpoint-sharp imagery and vibrant color detail. It’s not that the image looks bad by any stretch; in fact, if this disc had been released five years ago, the upgrade over Paramount’s 2001 DVD release might have seemed like a revelation. But the bar has been rapidly rising of late, and so the image here is in a tier below recent top-of-the-line work. On the sound front, the LPCM Mono track gets the job done throughout, allowing Elmer Bernstein’s score, the sporadic use of gunshots, and dialogue to come through with about as much force and clarity as one could reasonably expect.
Extras
The highlight of his loaded extras package is the audio commentary by filmmaker and critic Howard S. Berger, who, among other things, discusses the relationship between John Wayne and Don Siegel on set and critical takes of the film from the time of its original release. He also isn’t shy about telling us that he thinks Ron Howard was too old for the role of Gillom. Two visual essays, one by critic David Cairns and another by filmmaker and critic Scout Tafoya, examine the careers of Siegel and Wayne, respectively. Tafoya’s is especially striking for how it interrogates the dissonance between Wayne’s status as a global film star and his “abhorrent political views.” It’s an intricately considered and argued take on Wayne’s complicated legacy.
Other particularly notable supplements include an interview with western author C. Courtney Joyner about Glendon Swarthout, the author of the original novel, an appreciation of composer Elmer Bernstein and his score for the film by historian and broadcaster Neil Brand, and an archival featurette on Wayne’s career culminating in The Shootist. Also included is the film’s theatrical trailer and an illustrated booklet featuring new writing by critic Philip Kemp.
Overall
John Wayne’s 1976 swan song lands on Blu-ray with a solid transfer and, more notably, a stagecoach full of extras courtesy of Arrow Video.
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