The Shootist

John Wayne's last film, and that is exactly its subject. J. B. Books is a famous gunfighter. In 1901 he arrives in a town and sees a doctor. The diagnosis is cancer and he has weeks. Books has to decide how to spend what is left. Everyone in the town, on learning who he is, starts calculating: one wants to use his name, another to kill him, another to sell his last words. The frame is the West itself. In the year the story takes place there are cars in the street, the trolley runs, and the age of the gunfighter is long over. Books is not only ill, he is out of his time. The opening is built from footage of Wayne's own earlier films, making the character's past the same thing as the actor's. Wayne had fought cancer in that period and died of the same illness three years later. Don Siegel directed. Lauren Bacall plays the boarding-house keeper, Ron Howard her son and James Stewart the doctor. A particular production for anyone who likes westerns and the genre's farewell films. For a viewer wanting action, the film is almost entirely talk; the guns speak only at the end.