John Wayne and John Ford collaborated on some of the Hollywood Golden Age’s best-loved Westerns from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Perhaps their most famous was 1956’s The Searchers, which saw Duke play a Civil War veteran spending years searching for his abducted niece, played by Natalie Wood.
Still a student in high school at the time, Wayne and co-star Jeffrey Hunter had to pick her up and take her to set on a number of occasions.
The Searchers, which celebrates its 69th anniversary today, was shot in Ford’s favoured Monument Valley, part of the Navajo territory on the Arizona/Utah state line. During filming, temperatures could reach 49°C (120°F).
The director was brilliant and eccentric, chewing through the corners of a dozen handkerchiefs while smoking a pipe each day. He also discouraged chatting and bad language in front of women and insisted on an Earl Grey tea break each afternoon.
Maureen O’Hara, who worked on five movies with him, said in 2004: “He was a genius. He was the finest director any of us ever worked with, and we were proud to work with him and work for him. We realised that he was bad-tempered and awful but we accepted it and forgave him… He was abusive if it suited him and what he was after. I used to watch him and think, ‘Oh, he’s after something.’”
With such a reputation for anger, Reverend Captain Clayton, star Ward Bond, found himself on The Searchers set one day, barely managing to escape the filmmaker’s wrath.
One day, the actor, who would walk around naked in his motel room after filming with the curtains open in a futile attempt to attract co-star Vera Miles, realised he needed a shave, and what happened next was certainly a close one.
During the filming of Ethan’s speech, in which he recounts discovering and burying Lucy, Wayne nailed his first take, much to Ford’s delight. However, for some strange reason, the camera stopped, which left the director “supremely irritated.” He asked the cameraman what was wrong, only for the power to return and filming to resume.
What had happened was that Bond had pulled the plug so he could charge his electric razor. The crew knew the truth of the matter but decided not to tell Ford out of fear that the director would thump him.
Nevertheless, the director did indeed find out, long after the actor’s death of a massive heart attack in 1960. Years after The Searchers premiered, the film’s cinematographer Winton C Hoch told Ford at a Hollywood event how the late actor was responsible for losing Wayne’s perfect take.
Upon hearing this “Ford’s face turned white. He was uncharacteristically speechless because he didn’t have his favourite horse’s ass to kick around anymore.”