John Wayne Didn't Care About One Of His Collaborations With Dean Martin

When John Wayne starred in a movie, he expected all involved to operate at a high level of professionalism — even though he was known for drinking on set, which forced some of his directors to work around his escalating state of inebriation as the day wore on. But Wayne delivered when it counted, and, because he was considered the most bankable star in Hollywood during his prime, no one fought him too hard on the booze.

Perhaps they should have. Combined with his reported five-unfiltered-packs-a-day cigarette habit, the once strapping athlete's health was a mess for the last two decades of his life. He lost a lung to cancer in 1964, underwent open heart surgery in 1978, and ultimately succumbed to stomach cancer at the age of 72 in 1980. Because Wayne never let these struggles slow down his output (he had at least one movie in theaters every year between 1960 and his retirement from acting in 1976 with "The Shootist"), one wonders if some of the films he made during this period might've been better had he felt more up to the task physically.

While Wayne's 1960s were by no means a wash, he did lend his movie star stature to some fairly dire entertainments during the decade. Movies like "Hellfighters," "The War Wagon," and "The Undefeated" played a role in diminishing his legendary stature as he approached the 1970s. Amazingly, if he had any issues with those movies, he didn't bring them up when he sat down for an interview with Roger Ebert in 1968. No, he took dead aim at one of his most well-liked films from that rough stretch.

Roger Ebert was only two years into his career as a critic and features writer for the Chicago Sun-Times when he visited John Wayne on the set of "True Grit" in 1968. Given that this was the film that would earn the Duke his first and only Oscar for Best Actor, it proved to be a fortuitous assignment.

Early in the piece, Ebert asks the star about his collaborations with the director Henry Hathaway. This was Wayne's fifth feature with Hathaway as a solo director, but he wasn't all that complimentary about their previous feature together — which is particularly stunning 57 years later considering that it currently holds a perfect 100% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

In any event, according to Wayne, "The Sons of Katie Elder" was far from one of his favorites. As he told Ebert:

"I don't care for it much, myself. I had just got over that cancer operation and I thought I could hear myself breathing all the time. Everybody said it was my imagination. Well, old Henry was very thoughtful of me, of course, since I was recuperating and all. He took me up to 8,500 feet to shoot the damned thing and the fourth day of shooting he had me jumping into ice water. Very considerate."

Okay, getting lugged up to a high altitude when you're just getting used to having one lung doesn't sound like a party. But the film's a rock-solid revenge Western in which the title boys hunt down the killer of their mother (it was remade by John Singleton as "Four Brothers"), and, what's more, it reunited the Duke with his "Rio Bravo" co-star Dean Martin. They'd made one of the greatest movies of all time together. Surely, that counts for something.

Not for John Wayne apparently.