Did he really go out on a high note?? (major spoiler...)

I believe that somewhere during the movie, Duke's character says something along the lines of "the one who gets you is the one you aren't watching out for." Sure enough, when he got it, it was just the bartender.

He had an agenda and he had very little time in which to accomplish it, and nothing for which to look forward if he didn't achieve it. Even without inoperable cancer his world was itself dying. Note that one of the bad guys arrives in a horseless carriage; even the most primitive automobiles are not part of the Old West.

Heroic death isn't the worst tragedy possible. Sudden death by a bullet that he never saw coming -- or a horrible, helpless, slow death by cancer? What is consistent with J. B. Books? What is consistent with John Wayne's screen persona?

The bad guys must die, for their survival is inconsistent with the tamer West of the 20th Century.

I think Books character addresses this, when teaching Gillam how to shoot, that you have to watch out for the amaetur, which is what the bartender was. He'd taken care of the "bad guys", but forgot his own advice...and was killed by the rube.

To me, this film is like "Unforgiven." What it tried to do, was show that gunfighting was NOT glamorous. It was butchery, often entered into by cowards and cheats. The only thing people wanted was the fame that came from killing an icon. The bartender in the movie wanted what the other three in the bar wanted, to be famous for being the man that killed the great JB Books. Nothing glamoorous about the way he did it or the way so many others did it. It is a John Wayne film that denounces violence. That much is evident when Wayne commends (in a way) Howard's character for throwing away the gun.

"If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."

Possible explanation:

It's the danger that one doesn't recognize that does the most harm. J.B. Books would have never suspected the bartender; for the others he was well-prepared.

But a low note? Books died violently -- not that cancer is a peaceful and pleasant way to go. He was doomed, and he was living on opiates to make life somewhat tolerable for the while, and I can see the message: not only did cancer doom him, but the Old West of the gunslinger outlaws was itself dying. Lawmen like Books who survived because they were better shots had become irrelevant in a more settled, civilized, progressive West. The legend of the Old West would survive, but its participants could not last much longer.

I thought it remarkable that one of the outlaws used a 'horseless carriage' and that Books used a trolley -- objects that one does not associate with the heyday of the gunslinger era -- to reach the final scene. That, I believe, says much.

In a film where everybody is cynically trying to take advantage of a terminally ill man and gleefully insisting to his face that he should get busier with that dying business, getting shot in the back by a bartender seems pretty fitting.



"facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan