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Western movie legend John Wayne appeared in well over 100 films over the course of his decades-long career, but if you want to see them all, you’re out of luck. A handful of films featuring Wayne are considered lost media, including the 1936 Western “The Oregon Trail” and multiple projects from 1929. In some of the lost films, Wayne had only minor roles, but that wasn’t the case for Arthur Lubin’s 1937 actioner “Adventure’s End,” which the Duke starred in during a rare period spent making non-Western flicks for Universal Pictures.
“Adventure’s End” sounds like a rip-roaring adventure, at least by the standards of 1930s Hollywood. According to Mark Orwoll’s book “John Wayne Speaks,” the seafaring film features a forced marriage, along with “sharks, mutineers, rambunctious whales, and fistfights” that leave Wayne die-hards to “lament that this is one of the few Duke films they can’t see.” Lubin’s movie was based on a story by author Ben Ames Williams, and in it, Wayne played a Pacific Ocean pearl diver who runs afoul of a local Indigenous community when he starts diving in forbidden waters. In one of the best naming choices of Wayne’s career, his oft-shirtless character is called Duke Slade.
What happened to Adventure’s End?
Like many films from the medium’s earliest decades, most existing prints of “Adventure’s End” seem to have gone to the nitrate graveyard; the standard material for films from that era is notoriously unstable, hard to preserve, and more than a little explosive. According to ScreenRant, the movie may have also gone out of print because it was a “quickly slapped together cheapie” that bombed at the box office, but reviews from the time indicate that the high seas saga had a few redeeming qualities.
In his book “The John Wayne Filmography,” Fred Landesman gathered pull quotes from critics at the time, some of whom complimented Wayne’s performance and the film’s effects. While Variety’s critic reportedly said that the actor “floundered” in his role and called the movie “pretty shoddy,” the Motion Picture Herald thought “Adventure’s End” was a good excuse for Wayne to “display acting talent as well as expose his physique.” Film Daily, meanwhile, called it “easily one of the most effective [Wayne] vehicles.”
If you feel like you’re missing out on a movie in which (I can only assume) a bare-chested, heavily sideburned Wayne beats up a shark, all is not lost; according to ScreenRant, there may be a copy of the movie in the U.S. Library of Congress archives, where a print of another vanishingly rare film featuring the actor was discovered in 2004 (per BBC). And while no one in recent memory has had the chance to see movies like “Speakeasy,” “The Forward Pass,” and Words and Music” — a trio of lost films thought to feature Wayne in pre-stage name, mostly uncredited parts — signs indicate that “Adventure’s End” is out there somewhere. The movie was screened as part of CineCon 2023 in Los Angeles, according to a festival press release, and one Letterboxd user reported watching it at the “Mostly Lost” Film Festival, a Virginia-set event put on by the Library of Congress. Like a pearl in the ocean, perhaps “Adventure’s End” is a rare thing just waiting to be found.
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