For most of his career, John Wayne played the ultimate cowboy good guy, a hero with the white hat there to save people from whoever the bad guys happened to be at the time. However, this was not always the case. Later in The Duke’s career, he played an antihero, a bad man who does good things, but not always for good reasons. Wayne perfected this in films like The Searchers, Red River, and The Man Who SH๏τ Liberty Valance. Wayne didn’t play villains, but he played men with dark streaks.
There is a reason John Wayne didn’t venture too far outside his comfort zone, and much of it came from an incident when he made a movie in 1941 with director Henry Hathaway. This mostly obscure Western movie was Wayne’s first chance to play not only a man who was not a purebred good guy but also one of the first films to show that he was truly a good actor and wasn’t just someone playing himself, as many critics claimed. However, his role in The Shepherd of the Hills showed he could have been a villain if given the chance.
Shepherd Of The Hills Is A Great Western Revenge Story Starring John Wayne
John Wayne Played A Man Obsessed With Murder
John Wayne starred in several Western movies early in his career, but his true breakout was as the lead in Stagecoach, where he played the Ringo Kid for director John Ford. Wayne then became a regular in Ford’s movies for the next few decades. However, Ford wasn’t his only regular collaborator. Wayne also worked with director Henry Hathaway multiple times, including on the 1969 Western movie True Grit. Twenty-eight years before that film, Wayne worked on his first Hathaway Western, The Shepherd of the Hills.
In addition to the fact this was one of Wayne’s movies with Hathaway, he was also seen as a little less of a white-hat good guy. It was also The Duke’s first movie ever sH๏τ in Technicolor. Based on the novel by Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills stars Harry Carey as Daniel Howitt, a man who shows up in the backwoods of the Ozarks and develops a friendship with several locals after he buys some “haunted” land.
However, he finds himself developing an interesting relationship with Young Matt Matthews (John Wayne) and becomes a sort of mentor. Young Matt is a man seeking vengeance against a father he never met and who he blames for the premature death of his mother. He makes it clear he will kill the man when he finds him, and this leads to a big twist in the film with Daniel.
While Wayne was not a true antagonist, he was a troubled young man.
The film is an interesting take on love versus hate and the idea that a hateful, bitter Matt might end up saved by the one man who seems the kindest in the movie in Daniel, with Harry Carey delivering the perfect performance as a good, moral man living with the regrets of his past. While Wayne was not a true antagonist, he was a troubled young man who delivered a performance that he would meld into his later career movies, where he went even darker.
Shepherd Of The Hills Provides An Early Look At John Wayne’s Acting Potential
John Wayne Wanted To Do Different Things In His Career
One of John Ford’s funniest comments came after he watched John Wayne perform in Red River. At the time, Ford commented that he was shocked because he “never knew” Wayne could act. This seemed strange since Ford directed Wayne before seeing this movie, in which the Duke played a man doing some very bad things. However, Red River wasn’t the first time Wayne played this kind of role, and he showed the same talent in The Shepherd of the Hills.
Interestingly, Wayne loved playing against type and wanted to do more movies like that. However, a trusted person told him that was a bad idea. In his book Three Bad Men: John Ford, John Wayne, Ward Bond, author Scott Allen Nollen shared a story about Wayne saying he wanted to branch out into different roles and Harry Carey’s mother, actress Olive Carey, set him straight:
“You big, stupid son of a bi*ch. Would you like to see Harry do all these things you were telling these people? People have accepted you. They’ve taken you into their homes and their hearts now, and they like you as a certain kind of man.”
John Wayne mostly followed her advice. He didn’t play any evil men in his movies. Instead, he took on a few roles, like in The Shepherd of the Hills, where he played conflicted characters who did bad things but had reasons for their actions. His biggest success was in one of these films when he took his role in The Searchers, but he thankfully kept his hero hat on for most of his films, which is why he remains so beloved today.
