Anyone that knew Wayne and Huston well may have said that their creative partnership was doomed from the very beginning. “They had nothing in common. John Wayne loathed him,” Huston’s script supervisor Angelica Allen recalled. “He used to say, ‘I’m gonna kill him!’ I said, ‘I’ll fix up the appointment, what time do you want to come?’ But he didn’t want to be left alone with Huston.”
The Duke wasn’t afraid of his director, but he was afraid of his own temper getting away from him. “He was very regimented and could only go in one way. Very professional, but he wasn’t that bright,” Allen added. The actor instead expressed his discontent in a letter to his long-time collaborator John Ford. “It’s a little frustrating trying to arouse the […] sleeping talent of our lead, Mr. Huston,” he wrote.
Huston may not have been “sleeping,” but he certainly lacked the firm hand that Wayne admired in a director. When production ended, he left Hollywood to make his next film. The actor took advantage of Huston’s absence and decided to remake several scenes because he didn’t like the way his hair looked or “to give [his character] some vitality.”
Wayne ended up calling all the shots and completely transformed the film in post. Huston did not take kindly to being overruled. “When I brought it back to Hollywood, the picture, including the music, was finished … It was a sensitive, well-balanced work,” he wrote in his memoir twenty years later. “John Wayne apparently took over after I left… and when I saw it, I was aghast.”
