It’s no surprise that John Wayne, hero of the American Western, hated it. In fact, he disliked it enough to write a letter to the younger star telling him so. He said it wasn’t really about the people who pioneered the West,” Eastwood said, adding he meant his movie to be an allegory. “I realized that there’s two different generations and he wouldn’t understand what I was doing.”
As America’s most famous Western star, Wayne felt obliged to uphold certain ideals. “He was sensitive about the drift toward nihilism and probably felt a little threatened,” said Scott Eyman, author of John Wayne: The Life and the Legend.
It also may have been a little personal. A few years earlier, Wayne turned down Dirty Harry, the 1971 film that made Eastwood a superstar.
“I thought Harry was a rogue cop,” said Wayne. “I saw the picture, and I realized that Harry was the kind of part I’d played often enough – a guy who lives within the law but breaks the rules … to save others.”