Hi...

I admit, i'm not a John Wayne fan, and i'm okay with this...BUT i'm doing some research for a new guided walk about ranching in Big Bend National Park, AND my questions are:

1. Did John Wayne ever film any movies in the Big Bend, or any movies about the Big Bend?

2. Do John Wayne's cowboys ever depict him as a rancher? Could you name a couple? Do they depict him as a succesful rancher, or one struck by hard times?

I completely and absolutely appreciate any help anybody could give me.

Thank you...


:cowboy:

Hi!
I can't fully answer this question, more members will most certainly help out, but to start with, here's what I know:

Even though many of Wayne's westerns are set in Texas, the only film he actually filmed there was "The Alamo", in Brackettville, a film he originally intended to film in south America where he already found the locations and had made deals. The "Daughters of the Republic" "forced" him to do it in Texas.

The closest he got to filming in Texas were the movies he did in Mexico, beginning with "Hondo" in the Fifties and ending with "Cahill, US Marshal" exactly 30 years ago. Most of the films done in Mexico used locations close to Durango and the Mexico City studios.

Wayne sometimes portrayed ranchers, and the most famous of his characters are based on Texans: In the classic western "Red River" he played Thomas Dunson, and as a diary of "Great Tales of Texas" tells the audience, he was the first man to drive a herd up the Chisholm trail (yet filmed in Arizona). This character was loosley based on a real life Texas rancher. In "Chisum" (1970) he portrayed the true-life character John Simpson Chisum who came from Texas and carved a cattle empire out of Lincoln County, NM.
The "old rancher" became a trademark role in Wayne's later days: "Big Jake" McCandles, as the 1971 film tells us, held the biggest ranch in Texas (but again filmed in Mexico); in "McLintock" he put his name on a town (filmed in Arizona); in "The Cowboys" (1972) he taught boys the cowpoking, filmed in Wyoming.

The cattle men Wayne portrayed were always hardened by life, with a sense of humour, tough yet never cruel. He almost always portrayed financially successful men (with the exception of his rancher in "The Cowboys") yet men who got lonsome devoting their lifes to building their empire.

Wayne was a real-life rancher, he owned interest in a ranch in Arizona that still exists today, one of the few businesses he did outside the film-world that actually were successful. The whole story of the ranch and many photos showing Wayne as a happy rancher can be found in the great book "There Rode a Legend".

mellowmud,

Welcome to the greatest message board in the world for John Wayne fans and first rate answers to the tough John Wayne questions.

Itdo did a great job with the info about you question. He made most of his movies in Mexico, Arizona, and California. The only pictures I would not know for sure are his early movies and I'm almost sure they were filmed California since they were "B" movies and very budgeted, which leads me to believe they were close to home.

I think he was a cattle rancher in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. That is not clear, but I am almost sure of that too, and it was in Arizona.

Cheers, Hondo B)

Yes, especially the plots of his early efforts in B-Westerns were often set in Texas, as the titles already indicate: "King of the Pecos", "Lucky Texan", et cetera. But those sagebrush sagas were made on a modest budget and entirely filmed in the same areas close to Hollywood.

I believe in "Hellfighters" the Buckman Company (Wayne portrays a Red Adair kind of man) is located in Houston, although I'm not quite sure if they really went to Texas to film just one or two scenes that show the office from the outside, since the interiors were done at Universal.

I think "Shinbone" in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (he was a horse rancher in that one) was a fictional town. When they voted for statehood, did they ever say which territory they were in?