THE SHOOTIST **

"The Shootist" was John Wayne's last film and in it he plays an ageing gunslinger dying of cancer, so you could say it was a rather prophetic picture, (Wayne himself was to die of cancer three years later). You might even say the film is as much a summation of Wayne's career as a Western actor as it is an account of the character he's playing; it opens with a montage of scenes from earlier John Wayne pictures. He's John B Books and this, being his last film, is a somewhat sad affair; it's almost impossible to separate the actor from the character.

It was directed by Don Siegel in that lean, hard style of his and is more of a character study than a conventional western. It could be called an old man's film for as well as Wayne there's also James Stewart as the doctor who diagnoses his cancer and a no longer young Lauren Bacall as the widow who runs the boarding house where Wayne comes to stay as well as a host of ageing character actors from Richard Boone to Hugh O'Brian and a terrific Harry Morgan as the maliciously cynical old Marshall. There's a boy in the picture, too, (Bacall's son), and he's played, very well indeed, by Ron Howard.

In some respects the film is not unlike Henry King's "The Gunfighter", (there's the same sense of fate closing in, the same sense of a man's time coming to pass). You know that in time, and before the cancer kills him, Wayne will have to strap on his guns again as other shootists come 'a callin' and there's no denying it's a well-made film but there's also something rather ghoulish about it and I often wondered why exactly Wayne agreed to do it. Surely he knew he was dying himself and it's unlikely to have been vanity. Still, it's a nice low-key performance which, despite the obligatory action scenes, is a lifetime away from Rooster Cogburn or any of the other characters Wayne played during his long career. The film itself is actually based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout and the fine, elegiac script, which isn't without a certain degree of mordant humour, is by his son Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale.