John Wayne’s The Searchers co-star enraged John Ford for what he did to Duke | Films | Entertainment

John Wayne and John Ford collaborated on some of the most famous Westerns of the Hollywood Age from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Perhaps the most famous of them was The Searchers from 1956, where Duke played a Civil War soldier who spent years searching for his kidnapped 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 give her a fix on several occasions.

The Searchers was shot in Ford’s favorite Monument Valley, part of Navajo territory on the Arizona/Utah state line, temperatures during filming could reach as high as 49°C (120°F).

The director was brilliant and eccentric, chewing through the corners of a dozen handkerchiefs while smoking a pipe every day. He also objected to conversation and bad language in front of women and insisted on Earl Gray’s tea break every evening.

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Maureen O’Hara, who worked on five films with him in 2004, said: “He was a genius. He was the best director any of us had ever worked with, and we were proud to work with him and for him. We understood that it was ill-advised and terrible but we accepted it and forgave it… It was offensive if it suits him and what he was after. I was watching him and thinking, ‘Oh, he’s after something.'”

With so much anger on him, the Reverend Captain Clayton, star of Ward Bond, found himself in a situation on The Searchers one day where he barely managed to escape the wrath of the film.

One day the actor, who would walk around naked in his motel room after filming with the curtains open in a desperate attempt to woo co-star Vera Miles, realized he needed a haircut and sure enough the first thing that happened next close.

While filming Ethan’s speech in which he mentioned finding and burying Lucy, Wayne added his first take much to Ford’s satisfaction. However, for some strange reason, the camera stopped which the director found “very funny”. He asked the cameraman what was wrong, only for the power to return and the filming to resume.

What happened was that Bond pulled the plug so he could charge his electric razor. The crew knew the truth but decided not to tell Ford for fear the director would screw him.

However, the director did indeed find out, long after the actor’s death from a massive heart attack in 1960. Years after The Searchers premiered, the film’s cinematographer Winton C Hoch told Ford at an event in Hollywood how which the late actor was responsible for losing Wayne’s perfection. accept.

On hearing this “Ford’s face turned white. He was uncharacteristically speechless because his favorite horse’s ass was no longer there to kick around.”