B. Atkinson

I read Buddy Atkinson's BEAU JOHN mainly out of curiosity. A year or so before his death in 1979, John Wayne announced that a film version of BEAU JOHN would be his next picture. He wanted to do it with Ron Howard, with whom he'd developed a good relationship during filming of THE SHOOTIST. But THE SHOOTIST was Wayne's last film, as his health failed and he died of stomach cancer before BEAU JOHN was ready for filming. It's probably just as well. THE SHOOTIST was one of the great final films show more for an actor, the culmination and summation of everything Wayne's film career had been about. BEAU JOHN, on the other hand, derived from an amusing but slight comic novel, and while it would have been a rather remarkable change of pace role for Wayne, it would not likely have burnished his star any brighter. It might actually have been an embarrassment.

BEAU JOHN is a charming lightweight comedy with hints (bare hints) of kinship with TOM SAWYER, Faulkner's THE REIVERS, and any number of Hardy Boys novels. It's a rural treasure-hunt story, with a mildly raunchy angle involving a small-town sexpot, the horny 14-year-old boy who loves her, and his equally horny grandfather who loves her, too. The treasure hunt is rather far-fetched, though enjoyable. It involves piles of money that turn up scattered around a canyon with no known rightful owner but plenty of people who want to grab it. How the money got there and how it is found stretch credulity somewhat, but there's fun in the intrigue and mystery. Perhaps a little more interesting is the love triangle involving the aging redneck Lothario, Beau John (what would have been the Wayne role), his grandson Boomer (presumably the Ron Howard role, though Howard would have been years older than the book's character), and Roxanne, a free-spirited, sexual, but loving young woman. The romantic part of the tale is both charming and endearing, and Atkinson touches nicely on the difficulties for a man who has lost his youth but none of his ardor. While John Wayne was often romantic and even sexually charged in his movies, he never played a man with remotely as overt a sex drive as Beau John, and therein lies most of the interest such a movie might have held. But judging the novel on its own merits and not on its potential as a movie, BEAU JOHN is a diverting and humorous story without being a particularly noteworthy one. Atkinson, whose biggest claim to fame was writing many BEVERLY HILLBILLIES episodes, has written a sweet and entertaining novel several steps up the artistic ladder from his scripts for the Clampett clan, but nonetheless not a particularly memorable one. show less