John Wayne and John Ford’s careers in the cinema industry were intertwined from the moment that Ford got Wayne his first role in 1926 until their 1963 collaboration Donovan’s Reef. This final outing for Wayne on one of John Ford’s movie sets was a strange way to end their four-decade partnership, considering that they’d worked together on some of the greatest Westerns and war movies of the mid-20th century. A year after Ford directed the Duke in his gunslinging classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, however, the pair worked together one last time on this low-key comedy.
Although John Wayne’s droll sense of comic timing has always been an underrated feature of his acting, it’s far from the most prominent aspect of his onscreen work. Likewise, John Ford is celebrated for painting panoramic pictures of American landscapes on the silver screen, as well as his command of sprawling epic narratives with ensemble casts. He’s certainly not renowned for slapstick comedy and exotic Pacific adventures. Yet these are the elements that define Donovan’s Reef, a movie that couldn’t be further from Wayne and Ford’s previous collaborations.
The Last John Wayne Movie Directed By John Ford Was Donovan’s Reef
It Came 24 Years After Their First Western Together, Stagecoach
John Wayne’s first John Ford movie in a starring role was Stagecoach, Ford’s seminal 1939 Western. Yet his last, Donovan’s Reef, is a complete change of style and pace from Stagecoach, as well as from the pair’s 12 other collaborations in between the two films.
Donovan’s Reef sees Wayne play the eponymous Michael Patrick “Guns” Donovan, a sailor and World War 2 veteran who takes to living on a tropical island in the decades after the war is over. The movie is a curious family-themed comedy of misunderstandings, starring Lee Marvin, the actor who played the titular villain in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as Wayne’s wartime navy comrade, “Boats” Gilhooley, and sitcom actor Elizabeth Allen as the Duke’s love interest, Amelia Dedham.
Donovan’s Reef Is A Contemporary Comedy Adventure Set In French Polynesia
It’s A Rare Ford-Directed John Wayne Movie Not Set In A Historical Period
The movie that results from this combination of outlandish premise and incoherent casting is a decidedly mixed bag, as Donovan’s Reef fails to play to Wayne’s strengths. Even its bar fight doesn’t really convince, overegging the slapstick humor when we’re used to seeing the Duke shooting from the hip.
The French Polynesian island backdrop feels like a gimmick, and Wayne seems out of place in a contemporary 1960s setting that doesn’t carry any historical weight with it. If we compare the movie to John Wayne’s best Maureen O’Hara collaboration The Quiet Man, this earlier film does far better in taking a straightforward and unassuming approach to its quaint plot setup.
Unfortunately, Donovan’s Reef overreaches in terms of its ambitions for the story Ford wants to tell but does little to earn our attention in the telling itself. The humor and romance don’t quite land, and it’s a disappointing way for one of the all-time great actor-director collaborations in cinema history to end. While John Wayne would go on making captivating Westerns until his death in 1979, Donovan’s Reef was John Ford’s third-last movie as director and his final film with Wayne. Still, it’s best to remember those that came before it.