John Wayne has decided to end the era of the "false" heroes of the West

Wayne disputed this. "They never drank or smoked. They never quarreled," the actor lamented in Zolotov's biography. "A heavyweight can throw a chair at them, and they just look surprised." Wayne played dodgy anti-heroes with his white hat roles, like in John Ford's "The Searchers." This 1956 film tackled — though it didn't fully answer — long-standing questions about violence, racism, and gender dynamics within the genre. Wayne's Ethan was a vengeful anti-hero who once and for all shattered the illusion of the morally immaculate cowboy.

"They were too nice and pure to be dirty fighters," Wayne says of early movie cowboys. He adds:

"Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back. If someone throws a chair at you, shit, you grab a chair and gird them up right away. I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who really likes to kiss a girl he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to."

Ironically, this portrayal of a cowboy seems just as simplified and idealized today as the cowboys of the 1920s were to Wayne back then. The Western genre has mostly died out in recent decades as its traditional models of racism, nationalism and machismo have fallen into disuse. When he returned, it was with new versions of the cowboy story that revealed facets of the archetype rarely seen before, such as with Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" and "Power of the Dog" by Jane Campion. Both of these films center on stories of gay cowboys, a notion Wayne himself would likely find blasphemous if his homophobic reaction to "Midnight Cowboy" is any indication.