On this date in 1907, John Wayne was born. The Hollywood icon and proto-action star is best known for the Westerns and war films that defined his career, but one of his last films saw him take on a modern-day detective role: McQ.
It also happened to include a couple of great car scenes.
In the first, we join at the end of a shootout, after which McQ jumps in his Brewster Green '73 Pontiac Trans Am in an attempt to chase down a baddie. The car's a beauty, and the super-'70s wocka-wocka guitar makes it all the more fun.
The second clip is the film's climactic beach chase, which is noteworthy in that it features Hollywood's first cannon-assisted rollover. When Hal Needham rehearsed the stunt, it almost killed him. Here's the story, as told by our friends at Popular Mechanics:
In the 1974 action film McQ, starring John Wayne, legendary stunt coordinator Ronnie Rondell and Needham stage a spectacular car rollover on the beach. In those days, a ramp was used to pitch the cars into a rollover for movie stunts. But since this shot was planned for the flat and desolate beach, they couldn't hide a ramp with bushes or shrubs; it would look too odd. So Needham invented another way to flip cars: With a device later named the McQ Cannon.
"We built a cannon 16 inches in diameter with inch-and-a-half-thick walls—because I knew what was going to happen inside that cannon—and welded it to the back floorboard behind the driver's seat with the muzzle pointed toward the ground." The cannon was loaded with a 3-foot-long telephone pole and a black-powder charge. "The idea was to throw the car in a broadside skid and hit that cannon," he says, forcing the pole down and the car to rollover. "The crew prepared for a rehearsal of the stunt on a dry lakebed outside Los Angeles with a beat-up sedan and brought along five 4-ounce powder bombs. On the static test, they loaded in one of the charges. And the explosion only lifted the car up 6 inches. So for the real run they made the cannon more potent.
"I knew if we put two bombs in and it doesn't work, we'd only have two left, so we put them all in. The lesson I learned on this one: Powder squares itself in power." The crew pushed the junker car up to 55 mph and Needham threw the car into a skid. "When they hit the fire button it blew that car 30 feet up in the air and I was flying upside down and backward across the desert. The power of the cannon almost bent that car in half. I landed upside down when the car finished rolling—and I wasn't breathing." Needham managed to crawl out the back window of the car, received mouth-to-mouth from stuntmen Gary McLarty, and was carted off the to hospital. The doctor told Needham, "You have six broken ribs, a punctured lung, broken back." And Needham himself counted three teeth missing. Since Needham was in the hospital, he enlisted McLarty to perform the actual movie stunt (with a lot less explosives onboard) and he rolls the car several times, emerging from the wreckage unhurt.
This is what the final product looked like:
Finally, you'd be cheating yourself if you didn't surf over to The Sheila Variations for our friend Sheila O'Malley's annual John Wayne birthday tribute, which is loaded with great Duke stories.
NYC native, now in suburban exile. Miami Hurricanes alum. Brown-car evangelist. Beleaguered Knicks fan. Prefers IndyCar to F1. Wants you to stop clogging the left lane, already.
