A Final Outing For Ford/Wayne

Hawaii Location Dressed Casual: Donovan's Reef (1963)

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Gangway For This Year's BIG Adventure!, said posters for a last teaming of John Wayne and director John Ford. The tag was misleading for Donovan making no pretense toward adventure and looking for a most part like home movies the two sent back from Hawaii vacationing. In fact, this seems to have been Ford reward of a season in the sun for friends in then-good standing, finished work an apparent afterthought. Ford/Wayne's relaxation is what commends Donovan's Reef to us, especially now that Hawaiian scenery can be fullest enjoyed on streaming HD at Amazon, Vudu, and elsewhere. Para pluggers had little but fisticuffs, Wayne v. Lee Marvin's, to sell. Wayne in '63 mid-fifties admitted he was too old for this, but how to turn down Ford's entreaty when the old man might not be able to get Donovan's Reef (or any) project aloft without Duke's OK?

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They'd use Ford's yacht, the Araner, as Donovan backdrop, meaning Ford could collect much needed rent for a floating drag on personal overhead. Such craft, wildly expensive to upkeep, had been a floating second home to JF and crew during freeboot days when more of them were alive and able to withstand international bar crawls, but life was simpler now. Ford would sell the craft soon afterwards. As for Wayne, years of smoking was headed home to roost. He'd get worst kind of news from docs the year after Donovan's release. With regard local circulation of the pic, our Robin Hood Drive-In of Winston-Salem got Donovan's Reef first-run in accord with product glut that bowed this and other big ones outdoors for the triad area. No wonder vast majority, there and elsewhere, would see Donovan's Reef first on TV (9/17/66 premiere via NBC), wait-time ever shortening for features to tube-land.

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It's thankful we should be that Wayne's clout was such as to enable a Donovan's Reef. Behind-camera drama as since told makes us wish to have been on the trip to observe Donovan's team day-to-day: Ford losing interest and eyesight. Wayne's own patience with a mentor headed for dotage was ebbing. Other players who'd not seen Ford in years (Dorothy Lamour, Caesar Romero) realized good old days were spent. None of gloom spills onto result, however. Donovan's Reef wears a happy face and is catnip to Fordists. What he found funny was, as ever, a good sock to the jaw, one Victor McLaglen brawling as in old updated to a whole cast of McLaglen successors doing so here. There was $2.7 million in domestic rentals, under the prior year's Liberty Valance, but that with whatever foreign was realized hopefully put Donovan's Reef into profit.