The Shootist

Director: Don Siegel

1976 / 100min / 35mm

A fatally ill John Wayne made his final film appearance in Siegel’s goodbye-to-all-that Western, set well after the closing of the frontier in turn-of-the-century Carson City, Nevada, where, as the film opens, celebrated gunslinger J.B. Books (Wayne) is handed a terminal cancer diagnosis by country doctor James Stewart. Worried that the window to make a name as the man who shot down J.B. Books may be closing, fame-hungry desperadoes descend on Carson City en masse, and undertaker John Carradine is soon doing a brisk business. Less an elegiac goodbye to the Old West and to the most famous of screen Westerners than a final, violent convulsion, its cast well-stocked with crusty old saddle tramps like Carradine, Richard Boone, and Hugh O’Brian.

35mm print courtesy of the Paramount Archives

Distributor: Paramount