Western legend John Wayne slammed hit 1960s film as 'distasteful'

John Wayne didn’t understand the hype behind The Wild Bunch.

The Academy Award-winning actor was infamously known in Hollywood for his performances in films like True Grit, Rio Bravo and The Alamo, which turned out to be a brutal gamble that “broke his heart.”

A few of his films were deemed the best in Western cinema, giving him enough credibility to weigh in on the other films that tried to thrive in the genre.

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While speaking to Playboy in 1971, he admitted: “To me, The Wild Bunch was distasteful.”

The 1969 film that fell short in the eyes of the actor was based on a story about an aging outlaw named Pike Bishop, who was played by William Holden, the actor’s co-star in The Horse Soldiers.

In the gritty classic, Pike is preparing to retire after he completes one final robbery with his gang. He ends up discovering he is being set up by his old partner, Deke Thornton, portrayed by Robert Ryan. The betrayal turns into a gunfight that results in several casualties, which is the part of the plot that Wayne couldn’t get behind.

The actor said: “It would have been a good picture without the gore.”

His opinion wasn’t meant to be taken personal to the cast and crew. Wayne just saw films as family affairs and believed they shouldn’t have that level of “vulgarity.”

He continued: “Pictures go too far when they use that kind of realism, when they have shots of blood spurting out and teeth flying, and when they throw liver out to make it look like people’s insides.”

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“I don’t think it hurts a child to see anything that has the illusion of violence in it,” Wayne explained. “All our fairy tales have some kind of violence – the good knight riding to kill the dragon, etc. Why do we have to show the knight spreading the serpent’s guts all over the candy mountain?”

The reason for calling out The Wild Bunch aside from the rest came solely because the film was one of the frontrunners of this trend in Hollywood.

“The Wild Bunch was one of the first to go that far in realism, and the curious went to see it,” he mentioned. “That may make the bankers and stock promoters think that it is a necessary ingredient for successful motion pictures.

Wayne concluded: “They seem to forget the one basic principle of our business – illusion. We’re in the business of magic.”