John Wayne’s Most Stylish Western Revealed! Find Out Which One!

It seems we’ve pinpointed the film where John Wayne dons the finest attire of his western career. Not the blue tunic uniform from his Ford trilogy, nor his Davy Crockett gear in Alamo, or his “dandy” waistcoat in The Shootist. This comes from one of his lesser-known films.

Have You Seen This Western?

In Hondo, the desert man, John Wayne looks dashing, sporting a suede shirt with a few fringes, a white, red, and blue scarf, beige trousers. His hat is reminiscent of the one he would wear years later in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, and regarding weaponry, he carries his colt slightly backward rather than to the side like other movie cowboys, alongside his iconic Winchester from Stagecoach.

Away from the repetitive costumes of his later movies, where Wayne nearly wore the same outfit from film to film (as seen in Rio Lobo, Chisum, or The Train Robbers), here he wears a distinctive ensemble that suits him just as iconically, particularly as he was in good physical shape at 46 years old. Moreover, his character shows respect for Native American people and their customs.

Interestingly, Wayne was not originally slated to play the film’s hero. Glenn Ford was the first choice but declined after a negative experience on the set of The Raiders of Mexico, also produced by Wayne, a few months earlier.

A Challenging 3D Shoot!

Hondo, the desert man was a production of Batjac, John Wayne’s company, and directed by John Farrow. This Australian director, father of Mia Farrow, had been nominated for an Oscar for Best Director a decade earlier for Wake Island (1943). When Farrow joined Hondo, the script was already written and John Wayne had chosen all the settings and exteriors for the scenes, leaving little flexibility for changes.

The film was shot in 3D using huge cameras that had to be moved deep into the desert. This led to extra expenses and exhaustion, ultimately for naught, as John Wayne later revealed in Film Comment in September-October 1972: “We shot it in 3D, but it was never released in that format because Warner Brothers decided to drop it and go with the Fox system.”