107 is a ripe old age.
Or is that a joke I never heard?
They’re quoting lines from the movie.
“I thought you were dead.”
“Dead? The next person who says that I’m gonna shoot, so help me.”
Mine too. Patrick Wayne as one son, Chris Mitchum (Robert’s son) as another, and young Ethan Wayne playing the kidnapped grandson little Jake. Maureen O’Hara and John always made a good on screen pair, they were very close freinds in real life.
Chris Mitchum was great in Rio Lobo as well.
His daughter Toni appeared with him in The Alamo She’d been friends with my dad in middle school. John Wayne was friendly but usually just coming and going. My dad was a good-looking young blond guy, resembling Richard Widmark, and auditioned for a part as Widmark’s son, until he got into trouble and was packed off to military school. After my mom died my dad was telling me how unhappy he’d been in their marriage, so of course I said “why didn’t you marry Toni Wayne?”
Loved his cameo in “The Beverly Hillbillies”.
“Where was you when I needed you, John?”
I’m impressed that you know that movie. While every Seabee is very familiar with it (pretty much required viewing, and John Wayne was an honorary Seabee), most people have never heard of it.
IIRC, Fighting Seabees, Sands of Iwo Jima, and the Shootist are the only ones where Wayne gets killed.
The Fighting Seabees is mentioned over the PA system as a movie going to be shown at the camp in MASH. I thought at first it was in the movie, but upon reflection I guess it was the TV show.
References like this is pretty much all I know of it. I don’t recall it being on TV back-when unlike, for example, The Sands of Iwo Jima.
He was killed in nine movies, apparently, but yeah he was taken out by a sniper in The Fighting Seabees.
Not one of his better-known movies, for sure, and pretty corny, to boot. Also, at one point in the film he refers to “Tojo’s bug-eyed monkeys”, which wouldn’t play well in todays world. The Japanese stereotype in wartime movies was a buck-toothed, evil-looking man with thick glasses.
I spent a lot of nights watching old movies with my grandmother. John Wayne and and other star’s movies used to air frequently.
Makes sense since I think they’re both hammy actors. I really only like Maureen O’Hara in one movie – Only the Lonely.
Read somewhere that scenes w/ Wayne were usually filmed in the morning. This was because he liked to start drinking around noon time, and his acting performance would be sub-par when afternoon came around.
Wings of Eagles was the true story of Frank Wead. Of course with some poetic license. Wead was an influential figure in early Naval Aviation. He really did break his neck falling down the stairs in his house. Somehow he was able to return to active duty during WWII. He was also a screenwriter in Hollywood. Wayne and John Ford knew him. He wrote the screenplay for They Were Expendable.