Overnight sensations are an exceedingly rare breed in Hollywood, and even the names who go on to become legends need to scratch and claw their way to the top. They haven’t ever come much bigger than John Wayne, but he was so dissatisfied with one of his first major leading roles that he was ready to call it quits and find another line of work.
The future superstar and face of the ‘Golden Age’ western didn’t land his breakthrough role until he teamed with friend, father figure, mentor, and muse John Ford for the first time in 1939’s Stagecoach, which came 13 years and dozens of credits after his feature debut as a football player in Brown of Harvard.
Wayne went uncredited in all of his first 20 pictures, bar one, where he was listed in the credits as ‘Duke Morrison’ for the first and only time. It was Raoul Walsh who placed him front-and-centre for his maiden leading man gig in 1930’s The Big Trail, which promptly flopped at the box office and failed to elevate the actor’s career in the way he’d hoped.
Looking at what he’d go on to achieve and the genre he called home for the majority of the next half-century, it was fitting that Wayne’s first time taking top billing came in a western. However, for his next port of call, the studio had something completely different in mind, casting ‘The Duke’ in a type of film that nobody would ever associate him with; a romantic comedy.
Playing a college basketballer bristling with indignation at the idea of women being allowed to attend his educational establishment in Girls Demand Excitement, his mind soon changes when Virginia Cherrill’s Joan Madison catches his eye. Needless to say, the sparks begin to fly, and Wayne’s Peter Brooks realises the error of his ways with the women proving their worth in more ways than one when they take on the men’s team in a game of basketball.
As someone who’d go on to become the embodiment of onscreen Americana and steadfast masculinity, ‘The Duke’ sparring with a love interest in a light-hearted rom-com where women are placed on equal fitting to men was hardly reflective of his personal, professional, political, or societal choices and opinions in the years to come. Inevitably, he hated the movie so much he was ready to quit acting altogether.
“They had been training some girls to play basketball for some musical that they were going to make that would cost a lot of money,” he explained, per Bobbie Wygant. “Now, with the depression, they’ve decided against it. So now they have these girls that have learned to play basketball. So they write a story about a college in which the boys don’t want the girls there. So it was probably as ridiculous a thing as I’ve ever been in.”
Wayne admitted that he “really hated making that film,” decrying that “it had no substance to it and was a big comedown after the adventure I’d had on The Big Trail.” His first leading role was a bust, and his second came in a movie he actively despised, which placed ‘The Duke’ at a crossroads where he seriously contemplated walking away from Hollywood.