The big one
Jeff Arnold’s West has reviewed hundreds of Westerns and done overviews of
the Western careers of numerous actors, such as Henry
Fonda, Gregory
Peck, Glenn
Ford, James
Stewart, Gary Cooper,
and many more.
But the elephant in the room, the one not yet attempted, the big one, is,
of course, John Wayne.
Wayne was big in every sense, a sort of colossus of the Western movie. He
was involved in various capacities in close to a hundred Westerns and acted in
eighty (depending on your definition of Western). His career went from being a
prop boy on the 1926 Tom Mix
oater The
Great K & A Train Robbery to
starring in the splendid The
Shootist in 1976, his last Western and indeed his last movie. Fifty
years of Westerns. Many, especially in his early days, were low-budget
B-pictures, but many were fine films, key moments in cinematic history even,
directed by the likes of John
Ford, Howard Hawks, Henry
Hathaway and Raoul Walsh.
Wayne was largely ignored by the Academy Awards, finally winning only one
(consolation) Oscar for True
Grit in 1970. And the idea still persists that ‘John Wayne couldn’t
act’. What nonsense. Anyone who has seen Red
River or She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon or The
Searchers will know that he could indeed act, and superbly too.
Today we’ll look at the Westerns of John Wayne, and marvel.
I’m not going to rehearse the known facts of his life. It would make this
post far too long. It’s already pretty monstrous and if you don’t read it all
that would be more than understandable. You may want to skip to the movies or years
that interest you most. I’ve tried with sub-headings to make that easier to do. Anyway there are plenty of biographies you can
read to get all that, the best being John
Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman, Simon & Schuster, New York,
2014.
The best bio
I’m going to review Wayne’s career in Westerns, with personal observations
along the trail. The vast majority of Duke’s Western movies have already been
reviewed separately on this blog (and the rest will soon follow) so you can click the live links along the way
if you want to know more about any given picture.
The very first Westerns
At Fox in the late 1920s, when Tom Mix was king, ex-football player Marion Morrison, known as Duke, got a job
shifting scenery and handing out props. He also occasionally appeared as an
extra. So the first Westerns he was involved with (peripherally) were the entertaining
silent The Great K & A Train Robbery,
when he was not yet twenty, and the talkie Rough
Romance, an Oregon logging picture with George O’Brien in which Duke was
uncredited as a lumberjack.
In 1930, when he was 23, the prop-boy/extra on $35 a week was suddenly
catapulted into stardom when he landed the lead role in Fox’s huge Manifest
Destiny 70 mm wagon-train epic The
Big Trail, directed by Raoul Walsh. Studio heads grumbled at the
casting of an unknown but Walsh told them, “I don’t want an actor. I want
someone to get out and act natural – be himself.” That’s what he got. Walsh had
noticed Duke lugging furniture on the set of John Ford’s (non-Western) Born Reckless earlier in the year. “He
was in his early twenties – laughing and the expression on his face was so warm
and wholesome that I stopped and watched. I noticed the fine physique of the
boy, his careless strength, the grace of his movement.” The prop boy was indeed destined for bigger things.
The Big Trail
Fox promoted their new-found star, to whom the new name of John Wayne was
assigned, with a press release that was so hurried most of it was actually
true, and blurb that called him “a youth who bids fair to prove the screen
sensation of 1930 … a smile that is one in a million, a marvelous speaking
voice, a fearless rider, a fine natural actor and he has everything the femmes
want in their leading man.”
The Big Trail was a massive picture, involving an enormous
budget, hundreds of cast and crew and four months of location shooting. Fox
confidently forecast a $4m gross and lined up their new star for two more
Westerns. The studio flooded the country with publicity and photographs before
the première.
But the picture was over-written and much of the acting was very stilted.
Wayne was winning but often awkward. Visually stunning, the film was slow and
ponderous from a narrative point of view. Most people saw it in standard 35mm,
where it was much less impressive. Scott Eyman says it was an authentic epic
but an authentic epic flop. It grossed under a million and lost twice that. The
Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and subsequent Great Depression nearly did
for Fox and impacted very negatively on the movie business as a whole.
Wayne’s career as film star came to a juddering halt. The Big Trail was the last A-picture he would make for ten years.
He would spend the rest of the 1930s feeling lucky to get parts in B-Westerns.
Utterly demoralized, soon after the flop of The
Big Trail he met Fox’s biggest star of the day, Will Rogers, who kindly
advised him, “You’re working, aren’t you? Just keep working.” Wayne always
remembered that remark as “the best advice I ever got – just keep working and
learning, however bad the picture … and boy, I made some lousy pictures.”
The wilderness years
After Fox dumped Wayne, the young actor managed to get a short contract at
Harry Cohn’s Columbia. It was underwhelming: he had to play a corpse in one
picture and he landed non-starring parts in Buck Jones and Tim McCoy Westerns
which were so bad that they are today pretty well unwatchable. The first was
titled Range
Feud and the title screen below will give you an idea how sloppy and
trashy it was.
The acting was wooden (Wayne is by far the best actor on the set), the
budget rock-bottom and the writing dire. Range
Feud, Texas
Cyclone and Two-Fisted
Law were a series of cheap rip-off pictures Cohn wanted for the
increasingly popular double-bills. Wayne hated them but gritted his teeth and
kept working.
In the end, though, he was fired. Cohn (left) believed that Wayne was having an
affair with a young actress that Cohn himself lusted after. “It was a goddamned
lie,” Wayne fumed, still angry forty years after.
He
disliked the studio boss ever after, even to the point that when, twenty years
later, Cohn had a great screenplay, The Gunfighter, which
Wayne, by now a famous Hawks and Ford big star, desperately wanted to do,
he wouldn't because Cohn was offering it and he wouldn't work with Cohn. In the
end, Cohn sold it to Fox and Henry King directed Gregory Peck in one of the
greatest Westerns of all, in 1950. You could say that Wayne cut off his nose to
spite his face - or that he stood, decently, on principle.
Fired
twice in a year from major studios (if you call Columbia a major) Wayne now had
little choice but to walk further down Gower Street where the Poverty Row
studios lurked. He signed to do three (non-Western) serials for Mascot, a tiny
outfit started by Nat Levine in 1927 which only lasted nine years before being
absorbed into Republic. Levine made features for $30,000. The salary was
terrible and the conditions worse but at least Duke was following Will Rogers’s
advice and working. And it was there he made the acquaintance of stunt genius
Yakima Canutt and began a lifelong friendship.
Warners
Things
were bleak but they were now to look up a bit. In mid-1932 Wayne signed a
contract with Leon Schlesinger who had an in at Warner Bros. Schlesinger
produced a series of six Westerns and while these movies too were
quickly-produced B-Westerns (average time spent, three days per picture), Schlesinger
was able to use Warners’ high-class interiors and the movies had vastly
superior production values than than the Harry Cohn trash. They were well shot
by DP Ted McCord. The scripts were better and the acting too. Paul Fix was a
regular and would become a stalwart Wayne collaborator for years to come. Wayne
was paid $850 for each picture – a princely sum to him.
For me
the highlight of the series was The
Telegraph Trail, a breezy romp through the standard Manifest Destiny
theme of spanning the nation with wires. Duke (on his white stallion, the
second-billed Duke) naturally was the hero who overcame all obstacles and built
the lines. The picture is energetic and fun. It’s fifty-four black & white
minutes of straight-down-the-(telegraph)-line action. There’s a brave Army
scout as hero (Wayne, right), a comic corporal for light relief, “red devils” galore, a vile
renegade white man helping the Indians to try to prevent “American civilization
struggling slowly westward” and, of course, a fair maid to be wooed ‘n’ won.
What more could you want? Oh yes, the US Cavalry arrives at the last moment.
The Warners Westerns
usually grossed over two hundred thousand dollars each on release, a healthy
return for their very modest budget.
Wayne
was also learning fast: he is far more natural in these pictures, still with a
boyish charm but more assured, and more comfortable in scenes with actresses.
The six
Warners Westerns, in order (US release dates in brackets), are:
The Big Stampede (October, 1932)
Haunted Gold (December, 1932)
The
Telegraph Trail (March, 1933)
Somewhere in Sonora (May, 1933)
The Man from Monterey (July, 1933)
(The missing links to be reviewed soon).
In June 1934 Duke married Josephine Alicia Saenz and he and Josie moved in to a three-room apartment. Children would soon follow. It was essential that he got work. But the last Warners Western of the deal had been released in July ’33. At this point producer Paul Malvern stepped in and proposed a series starring Wayne at Monogram. Monogram was another Poverty Row studio, founded in 1931 and specializing in cheap second features. It too would be absorbed into Herb Yates’s Republic in 1935.
In June 1934 Duke married Josephine Alicia Saenz and he and Josie moved in to a three-room apartment. Children would soon follow. It was essential that he got work. But the last Warners Western of the deal had been released in July ’33. At this point producer Paul Malvern stepped in and proposed a series starring Wayne at Monogram. Monogram was another Poverty Row studio, founded in 1931 and specializing in cheap second features. It too would be absorbed into Herb Yates’s Republic in 1935.
Paul Malvern - rather dashing
Monogram – the Lone Star Westerns
The backbone of the
studio in those early days was a father-and-son combination: writer/director
Robert N Bradbury and cowboy actor Bob Steele, a pal of Duke’s from his early
days in Glendale. Bradbury wrote and directed most of Malvern’s early Monogram
Westerns, under the Lone Star brand. While budgets and production values were
low, Lone Star Westerns rattled along energetically and made the most of the
very limited resources. Budgets were often only $10,000 per picture.
RN Bradbury (right) with his son Bob Steele
It was a big step down
from Warners, and even from Columbia. Poverty Row was where washed-up actors
usually ended up, not where emerging talent started. But work was work. Twelve
pictures were planned (actually sixteen were made in the end, released at
roughly six-week intervals over a year and a half) and they all had zip and
pace. Bradbury was a fan of fast action, rapid pans and snazzy dissolves. Paul
Malvern hired Archie Stout to shoot the pictures and Stout gave Bradbury what
he wanted. Ornery and cantankerous, Stout, who had worked with Henry Hathaway
at Paramount on the talkie remakes of their silent Zane Grey stories, was a
real pro who occasionally would produce artistic work (as John Ford would
understand).
Archie Stout
Yak Canutt was Duke’s
stunt double and second unit director, often also playing a henchman of the
villain – sometimes even the lead villain. Many of the scripts were written by
Lindsley Parsons, a surfing buddy of Duke’s, who churned out cheap gangster
movies and Westerns for Monogram with aplomb, for $100 a pop. He and
Bradbury as writers loved mistaken identities, secret passages and villains in
disguises. There was usually a crusty old-timer (often Gabby Hayes), some comic
relief and a pretty girl for Duke to woo and win. Sometimes too there was a
plucky young lad for the largely juvenile audience to identify with. Corny
stuff, maybe, but it went down well in the theaters.
Like many 30s Westerns,
these pictures inhabit
that weird twilight world in which there are modern trucks, cars and trains and
most characters wear contemporary (i.e. 1930s) clothes, yet pistol-packin’
cowpokes in range duds ride the trail and hold up stages. I suppose that the
‘Wild West’ was still so recent in the memory of the audience of the day
(rather like movies set in the 1970s to us today) that they could almost
believe that this world existed. Or at least suspend their credibility for 54
minutes.
Writing
of Wayne at this time, Eyman rather astutely says:
Wayne wasn’t the worst actor among the B
movie cowboys, but he wasn’t the best either. He was taller than Bob Steele –
everybody was – but at this stage in their careers, Steele was a better actor.
Wayne was sexier than Hoot Gibson, but Gibson was a better rider. What Wayne
had was charm, great good looks, a wonderful smile, and the beginnings of
technical and physical assurance to go with the assertiveness that was written
into the characters, if not always the performances.
One problem was that
screen cowboys in those days were expected to sing. They had to strum guitars
while on horseback and serenade the leading lady under the moonlight. But Wayne
couldn’t sing worth a damn. They dubbed his songs usually, with a rich and
fruity operetta baritone utterly unlike Wayne’s own voice, but in Riders
of Destiny Bradbury made Wayne, as feared gunfighter Singin’ Sandy, use
his own voice. The result is hilarious.
Singin' Sandy
Someone forgot to renew
the copyright on these movies later on with the result that they are all now in
the public domain. The upside of that is you can easily find them. The downside
is that they have often been copied and recopied to the point where the print
quality is lousy. But they are all an entertaining watch. My favorite is The
Trail Beyond, a Canadian Western which is huge fun and co-stars both
Noah Beery Sr. and Noah Beery Jr.
The Lone Star Westerns in
order (US release dates in brackets) were:
Riders of Destiny (October, 1933)
Sagebrush Trail (December, 1933)
The Lucky Texan (January, 1934)
West of the Divide (February, 1934)
Blue Steel (May 10, 1934)
The Man from Utah (May 15, 1934)
Randy Rides Alone (June, 1934)
The Star Packer (July, 1934)
The Trail Beyond (October, 1934)
The Lawless
Frontier (November, 1934)
'Neath the Arizona
Skies (December, 1934)
Texas Terror (February, 1935)
Rainbow Valley (March, 1935)
The Desert Trail (April, 1935)
The Dawn Rider (June, 1935)
Paradise Canyon (July, 1935)
Republic
In 1935
Herb Yates (left) at Consolidated proposed a deal to Nat Levine at Mascot and Trem
Carr at Monogram. The studios would merge and buy up other smaller Poverty Row
outfits, in effect centralizing Poverty Row output in the new Republic
Pictures. Levine would run production, Carr would supervise and Yates would run
the business. John Wayne’s career was now in the hands of the shrewd
Brooklyn-born Yates who, Wayne thought, “didn’t have a creative bone in his
pear-shaped body”. Yates was first and foremost a businessman, and he believed
that the way to fortune was by making movies cheaply. He was famous for having
said, “Some people make dollar cigars. We make nickel cigars. Remember that.” It was an inauspicious start but once again, it was work.
In time
John Wayne would become Republic’s biggest and most bankable star, a sort of
cut-price Clark Gable for MGM. But not yet. For now, the recipe was much as
before, and the crews and casts were the old ones too. In effect, it was more
of the same, cheap one-hour B-Westerns to run as second features.
Wayne’s
first eight Republic movies, the likes of Westward
Ho (Republic’s first picture), Lawless
Range or Winds
of the Wasteland (the last for a time), are pretty well
indistinguishable from the Lone Star ones. It was business as usual. The
formula was simple: as Wayne explained to Peter Bogdanovich, “The quickie [movies]
are those kinds of pictures in which you tell the audience what you’re going to
do, then you go do it, and then you tell them what you’ve done, then you tell
them what you’re going to do next.” They were thus undemanding fare suitable
for unsophisticated viewers, and often quite talky, as the various characters
explained the plot to each other, so they had to be pepped up with a lot of
rapid action in between. But they were enjoyed. They were light and
unpretentious entertainment for the mid-West masses.
After Winds of the Wasteland in July 1936
there came a Western pause. Wayne now made six non-Western pictures for
Universal, in an attempt to broaden his appeal. The critics were only
moderately kinder than they had been and Wayne was unhappy there. "I had
lost my stature as a Western star and got nothing in return,” he said. It was
back to the saddle.
He made a one-off
Western at Paramount, Born
to the West, released in December 1937. The picture had something Wayne
hadn’t seen much of since he’d done The
Big Trail: budget. Not that it’s a huge Paramount production.
It was still a 59-minute B-picture. But it had a rather glossier look to it
than Wayne was used to. There are some classy wide shots of cattle, probably
Paramount stock footage but still. Wayne appears much more at ease in this
movie, quite relaxed and delivering his lines with a certain panache. The lines
are better, mind. I quite like this picture.
At the time RKO was
looking for a replacement for George O’Brien, so that was now a possibility,
but they passed on Wayne. So it was back to Herb Yates and the series of Three
Mesquiteers Westerns. It was a reasonable deal – eight pictures at a salary of
$3000 each – but it was still only half what he had been getting at Universal. And the
movies were pretty low-grade stuff, only one step up from a serial, really.
The Three Mesquiteers
William Colt
MacDonald’s popular novels were destined for the screen. There had been two
independent motion pictures, Normandy Pictures’ The
Law of 45s in 1935 with Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams as Tucson Smith, and
RKO’s Powdersmoke Range later the
same year with Harry Carey as Tucson Smith, and Hoot Gibson as Stony Brooke,
and Big Boy Williams returning but as Lullaby Joslin.
Then Republic took
over the franchise and produced no fewer than 51 pictures between 1936 and ’43,
with a variety of actors but always with a trio of pards ridin’ the range and
rightin’ wrongs. There had already been five in 1938 before Wayne (right, as Stony) joined the
team in Pals
of the Saddle in August. He took over from Robert Livingston as Stony
Brooke. Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan was Tucson Smith and Max Terhune (with his
ventriloquist’s dummy Elmer as the alleged comic relief) was Lullaby Joslin.
The series was
hugely popular. It was the only one of its kind to be specifically named and
rated in contemporary polls of the top Western film stars. The Motion Picture Herald consistently
ranked the series in its top ten, reaching a peak of 5th place in 1938, when
John Wayne joined.
The Wayne pictures were:
Pals of the Saddle (August, 1938)
Overland Stage
Raiders (September, 1938)
Sante Fe Stampede (November, 1938)
Red River Range (December, 1938)
The Night Riders (April, 1939)
Three Texas Steers (May, 1939)
Wyoming Outlaw (June, 1939)
New Frontier (August, 1939)
So Wayne made four in
’38 and four in ’39, with Stagecoach,
released in February ’39, in the middle.
All were directed by
diminutive, cherubic George Sherman (left). Wayne remained a stalwart Sherman
supporter ever after, and as late as 1971 Sherman was credited director on
Wayne’s Big
Jake, though by then the poor fellow was pretty well out of it and
Wayne himself did most of the directing. It was typical of Wayne, though; he
was intensely loyal to friends and former colleagues.
The first Three
Mesquiteers picture, Pals of the Saddle, is (vaguely) set during some post-1938 world war, at least one
assumes so, and has a plot about a crooked scheme to mine the poison gas
‘monium’ and ship it out of the USA for use by (unnamed) European powers.
Naturally, the pals foil the evil machinations. Children must have enjoyed it.
Overland Stage Raiders has the same contemporary-yet-Wild West setting, with
the Stetsoned and spurred pals riding the range with sixguns on their hips, yet
cars and planes figuring and the rest of the cast in modern dress (the chief
villain always in a suit). It’s odd, but you get used to it. In fact the
internal combustion engine is central to the plot of this one: while we are
used in Westerns to plots about stage lines being put out of business by the
railroads, in this one the robbed stage in question is a bus and it is replaced
by an air service.
Santa Fe Stampede was a lusty
little Western which also featured good old William Farnum. It’s interesting
because it is already clear in it that Wayne is the star. The other two
mesquiteers are pretty well bystanders.
Red River Range has a rustling
plot. The twist is that the rustlers are using big trucks (which, thanks to
speeded-up film, manage to hold the road at over 100 mph). Though Stony has a
rep for romancing the dames, he never actually gets one. In Red River Range, however, we are 'amusingly'
led to believe he has fallen into matrimonial clutches in the last reel. But
luckily someone else marries Jane and the three pals can ride off into the
sunset to find their next adventure, which is pretty well de rigueur.
Wayne felt trapped. He
seemed condemned to B-Western leads for minor studios. The plots and scripts
were formulaic and trite. They gave him no scope. Even the titles blurred into
each other: The Man from Monterey for
Warners, The Man from Utah for
Monogram; The Lawless Frontier for
Monogram, The New Frontier for
Republic; Lawless Range and The Lawless Nineties; they seemed
indistinguishable.
John Ford
For several years
after The Big Trail, John Ford (right) simply
cut John Wayne dead. He could be a spiteful and unforgiving man and he was not
about to pardon Wayne for being ‘discovered’ not by him but by Raoul Walsh, a
director and figure whom Ford envied. So while Ford went from strength to
strength, Wayne had no part in that.
But by the mid-30s
Wayne was at least readmitted to Ford’s social circle. He, along with Ward Bond
and a few other courtiers, were regular guests on Ford’s yacht, the Araner, or
at his house for drinking and cards. Wayne seems to have had a curious
admiration of, almost dependency on Ford, craving his approval. Ford semi-sadistically enjoyed
withholding that. He was scathing of Wayne’s Republic Westerns but offered no
part which would enable Wayne to escape them.
It may genuinely have
been that Wayne was, in Ford’s estimation, not yet ready for an A-picture lead.
In any case Ford wasn’t making Westerns; he hadn’t done one since the silent 3 Bad
Men in 1926. But in late ’38 Ford finally found the right script for
John Wayne.
Even then Ford toyed
with the young actor, inviting him onto the Araner, outlining the project and
asking Duke disingenuously who he thought might be suitable to cast as the Ringo Kid. Of
course he had already decided on Wayne. It was just malicious fun.
Wayne's years in the wilderness
during the 1930s had been somewhat less than Churchillian, and Winston's didn't
involve acting in low-budget B-Westerns for minor studios (at least not to
my knowledge) but poor Duke had wallowed in pretty low-grade oaters all through
the 30s. Yet as the decade drew to a close, the two giant figures
re-emerged, Duke and Winnie, to a commanding position in their respective
genres (Western movies and geopolitics, respectively). John Wayne was the star
of Stagecoach.
Stagecoach
Stagecoach was in fact an
ensemble piece, not a star vehicle, and Wayne’s was actually almost
a minor part: the Ringo Kid appears late on the scene, when the other
characters are already established, and he has fewer lines. And he is
surprisingly passive for a hero, surrendering his guns in the coach, giving up
his freedom and even his true love at the end of the trip (it's the
marshal who arranges his escape). Wayne only got $3700 for his fee,
barely more than John Carradine for the gambler part. But small part or not,
Wayne’s sheer power and charisma allow him pretty well to dominate the cast.
Ford helped: he made sure the camera homed in on the Kid often for silent reaction shots.
The Ringo Kid is the hero of the piece, and Wayne, from the stunning entry Ford
gives him onwards (you'll never forget it), is undoubtedly the star of Stagecoach. John Wayne now showed that he wasn't just a Poverty Row B-Western guy; he was a real Western actor.
The movie was an unsensational
but decent box-office success but a great critical hit. The Daily News wrote, “Every part is admirably acted … and John
Wayne is so good in the role of the outlaw that one wonders why he has had to
wait all this time since The Big Trail
for another such opportunity.” How true. Pauline Keel wrote of Ford’s “simple, clear,
epic vision” and said that the movie “had a mixture of reverie and reverence
about the American past that made the picture seem almost folk art.” Westerns
through the 1930s had become repetitive, slightly infantile pictures which
appealed to some but left many adults indifferent. After Stagecoach,
grown-ups formed lines outside movie theaters to see Westerns again and all the
big studios, sensing the $$$ potential, got in on the act.
Scott Eyman wrote that
“the modern Western starts here.”
And had John Wayne’s
career as an A-picture star finally, at long last, been launched? Or would
Stagecoach be another Big Trail,
another false start? Well, it was in a way. It would be almost another decade
before Wayne got the lead in another truly fine adult Western, Howard Hawks’s Red
River, released in 1948. For now, it was back to Republic to finish
those contract Three Mesquiteers movies.
Back to Republic
The Night Riders saw the
heroic three pards becoming vigilantes to foil the nefarious land-grab schemes
of villain George Douglas. Three Texas
Steers is a circus story (Wayne was in quite a few of those over the years)
in which the Mesquiteers thwart the schemes of villain Ralph Graves who wants
to get his greedy hands on the ranch of circus owner Carole Landis. In Wyoming
Outlaw the three foil a crooked politician (LeRoy Mason) in order to help a
man reduced to stealing cattle to feed his family. New Frontier is a dam story (dam building was all the rage in those
New Deal days) in which Stony and his pals lead the farmers who are to be
dispossessed and also foils the crooks who want to cash in. All in all, Wayne’s
heart must have sunk.
Still, things were in
fact looking up. Herb Yates wanted to cash in (of course) on the new-found – or
refound – stardom of John Wayne. He had Gene Autry and Roy Rogers for cheap
Westerns. Now he had visions of grandeur. Two days after the end of shooting on
New Frontier, he loaned Wayne out to
RKO to make Allegheny Uprising, a
1750s tale which took a full eight weeks to shoot and which reunited Wayne with
Stagecoach co-star Claire Trevor. And
then Yates really pushed the boat out: he put together Dark
Command, a major project for Yates, and a big budget - $750,000, no
less! To add weight, Walter Pidgeon was borrowed from MGM to co-star and Raoul
Walsh from Warners to direct. And, yes, Claire Trevor again.
A big-budget Republic picture. Gosh.
Ten years on from The Big Trail, Walsh said, “The trouble
with most competent but ungifted actors, and that’s what the Duke is, is that
they think they’re wonderful. Wayne does not. He’d read a script and shake his
head. … ‘It’s too hard. I’m not good enough for it.’ You let Wayne alone, let
him do the thing the way he feels he can, and he’s fine.”
The dashing Raoul Walsh
He was indeed fine. Dark Command is no Red River but it was probably Republic’s best ever film and Wayne
was excellent in it. It’s a farrago about Quantrill (Pidgeon played ‘William
Cantrell’) in Kansas and it’s all a lot of hooey historically, but that was par
for the course. The Jack Marta black & white cinematography and the Victor
Young score give the picture real atmosphere. It all climaxes with a
spectacular rendition of the raid on Lawrence. The picture was both a critical
and box-office success and it filled the theaters. Wayne’s reputation went up
another notch.
The early 40s
Wayne now began a
period of loan-outs and independent pictures combined with bread-and-butter
Republic Westerns. This phase was to take him all through the war, when many
other cowboy stars had joined up. In fact he didn’t do that many Westerns.
Dramas of various kinds, romances and of course war films occupied him more. He
did The Long Voyage Home, released by
United Artists and, later, They were
Expendable at MGM for John Ford, and Reap
the Wild Wind for Cecil B DeMille at Paramount. DeMille had earlier turned
Wayne down for the part of Wild Bill Hickok in The Plainsman, preferring Gary Cooper, saying that since The Big Trail “a lot of water has passed
under the bridge.” So he wasn’t exactly Duke’s favorite director. Wayne got his
own back, though: when in 1940 DeMille asked him to do North
West Mounted Police, (again he used Coop), Duke sent him a note,
refusing, adding that “a lot of water has passed under the bridge.”
Cecil B DeMille
A non-Republic Western
– well, semi-Western - was Paramount’s The
Shepherd of the Hills in 1941, directed by Henry Hathaway, in which Wayne
starred with his old mentor Harry Carey. Hathaway and Wayne held each other in
esteem for many years and would of course work together again.
Hathaway chats with Duke. They got on.
In ’42 at
Universal Duke starred with Randolph Scott and Marlene Dietrich (with whom he was
having an affair) in the latest (and best) version of The
Spoilers, a rambunctious Alaska gold-rush tale. In ’43 he did RKO’s A Lady Takes a Chance, a rom-com Western
with the great Jean Arthur. And in ’44 Wayne was back at RKO to make Tall
in the Saddle, with old pals Paul Fix (who co-wrote it), Ward Bond,
Gabby Hayes and Ray Hatton. His friend Robert Fellows produced it. In fact, Tall in the Saddle is rather good and
Duke as the hero Rocklin is the classic tough hombre. He was beginning to
establish a Western persona now, a name, a voice, a walk, and this kind of role
would last him the rest of his career.
Harry Carey Sr
Otherwise, there were
pretty standard pictures back at Republic. They paid the bills. In Old California (1942) and its sequel In Old Oklahoma (1943), enjoyable
B-Westerns, were followed by the rather lurid Flame
of Barbary Coast and Dakota
in 1945. These two were directed by Republic standby Joseph Kane, of whom Scott
Eyman has said that he was “a man who made more than one hundred movies without
an interesting shot to be found in any of them.” In Dakota Wayne had the misfortune to be saddled with Herb Yates’s
mistress Vera Hruba Ralston as leading lady. Ms. Ralston was neither attractive
nor talented, and her middle-European accent was what many would have described
as thick.
The late 40s
Wayne’s next Republic
Western, the rather charming Angel
and the Badman in 1947, was announced on the title screen as “A John
Wayne Production.” He had moved up and was taking more control. James Edward
Grant wrote it and he did a fine job with the screenplay.
James Edward Grant
The script is intelligent,
occasionally dryly witty and interesting too. The characters, even the minor
ones, are very well delineated. It was
Grant’s first collaboration with Wayne. He would go on to work closely with
Duke, notably writing Hondo
and The
Alamo. Later he would do several other Wayne Westerns. Wayne also let
him direct Angel, his first of only
two pictures at the helm, and it is probably true that directing was not his
forte. But Wayne said:
It sure changes when you’re the producer as well as
the star … As a producer I want to give people new chances. If they click, I’ll
feel that it will be a sort of repayment for the brand of friendship and trust
that Jack Ford has given me.
Angel is in fact almost an
anti-Western: a gunslinger is reformed by the love of a Quaker girl. It harks
back more to William S
Hart than to early Wayne Westerns. Wayne gave the part of the marshal to
Harry Carey and he was masterly in the role, remaining in the memory. Another
Wayne groupie, Bruce Cabot, plays the villain, very well. The black & white
photography was by Archie Stout, so competent it verges on arty.
There are some lovely shots of riders on a ridge, a favorite image of his. Wayne
was beginning to assemble his ‘stock company’, like John Ford. Angel is a pretty little film with real
qualities.
With Gail Russell in Angel and the Badman
And talking of Ford,
it would soon be time for Wayne to really shine, as lead in the three great
Westerns we know as John Ford’s cavalry trilogy: Fort
Apache, She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio
Grande. Before then, though, came the absolutely splendid Red River.
Red River
Red
River was the only Western
in which Howard Hawks matched the work of John Ford. It is a mighty film. One
thinks of Ford while watching it not only because Hawks elicited a stunning
performance from John Wayne but also because of the epic grandeur of the movie,
the noble themes and the fact that each shot is framed as a work of art.
Dunson ages in Red River
Ford does seem to have
had some input to Red River. Tag Gallagher, in his book John
Ford: The Man and his Films (University of California Press, 1984),
suggests that Ford assisted Hawks on the set and made numerous editing
suggestions, including the use of a narrator. It may have been so. Certainly
Ford wrote to Hawks asking him to “take care of my boy Duke”. Hawks did say
that he often thought of Ford when shooting,
particularly in a burial scene when ominous clouds started to gather. Hawks
later told Ford, "Hey, I've got one almost as good as you can do - you
better go and see it."
Wayne’s performance as
the Capt. Bligh-like Thomas Dunson is towering. He had never been better and he showed
that he could handle a major part in a huge movie with power, confidence and
conviction. After seeing Wayne's performance in the film, Ford is quoted as
saying, "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act" – which was a
bit rich after Stagecoach, in which
Wayne had pretty well outshone all the rest of the cast.
Howard Hawks
In a 1974 interview,
Hawks said that he originally offered the role of Dunson to Gary Cooper but
Coop declined it because he didn't believe the ruthless nature of Dunson's
character would have suited his screen image. Hard to say it, but I don’t think
even Coop could have done it better.
The picture was a big
hit, being 1948's third-highest grossing film at $4.15m. And it really made
John Wayne into a leading Hollywood star. Furthermore, it ushered in Wayne’s
period of true greatness. In the space of only three years, 1948 - 50, he made
six Westerns, four of which were fine, fine films.
The cavalry trilogy
Fort
Apache is essentially a war
film, almost an apologia for the US Army, and in the post-Second World War
period it must have resonated. But it is also a seminal work of mythography. From
1947, Year 1 you might say of the Cold War (the year Russia got the bomb) and the year Fort Apache
was filmed, frontier conflicts in which decent and brave Americans faced up to
the menace of the ‘red’ men represented how America would confront the ‘red
threat’ of the Communist world. In many of these post-war Westerns, Fort Apache included, the recently concluded Civil War was to be
read as World War II. The movies were often pretty obvious metaphors of the
contemporary scene. But Fort Apache
is also a true Western which follows many of the conventions of the genre, and
an outstanding Western too.
The casting was
inspired. Wayne played a natural Westerner, languid, wise, knowing, ‘the man
who knows Indians’, while Henry Fonda was given the part of the rigid martinet,
Easterner Colonel Thursday, stiff as a poker. It gave great scope to both and
both were superb. Like Red River
(shot before Fort Apache but released
after) Fort Apache established Wayne
as the dominant actor in the genre, and like Red River it was both a critical and commercial hit.
After Fort Apache Ford, anxious to make money
to compensate for his megaflop The
Fugitive, moved straight on the same year with another oater, this time for
MGM, a Technicolor remake of a sentimental tale, 3
Godfathers, again with Wayne. Wayne is good in it but the picture was
far from Ford’s finest and has been described as “terminal treacle”. But then,
immediately, even before 3 Godfathers
was released, Ford returned to the cavalry theme for RKO, yet again
with Duke in the lead, and went into production with a picture shot by the
highly talented (and Oscar-winning) Winton C Hoch, whom he had used on 3 Godfathers, which was given the title She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
Naturally,
the setting was Monument Valley, which contributed so much to so many Ford
Westerns. Wayne later wrote, “We lived in a tent city [Wayne was slightly
stretching the we there: he and Ford
were the only ones to have private cabins] and at night we played cards …
Sometimes the Sons of the Pioneers were there, and they sang too. It was kind
of captured companionship and we made the most of it. And most of it was
delightful because it was different from the way we lived at home.” This
nostalgic view was not, however, the way most of the cast and crew remembered
the location shooting; it was pretty basic out there in the valley.
This
time John Wayne is crusty Captain Nathan Brittles, in his last week of service
before retirement. Wayne’s performance is stunningly good. He is totally
convincing as an elderly officer, twenty years older than his real age; the way
he walks and looks and talks are just right. Of course he had done something
similar for Hawks in Red River. The
business with the spectacles as he examines the inscription on the farewell
watch could have been saccharine but it is in fact very moving. Wayne said that
this was his favorite role ever. “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
What Wayne was now showing, in spades, was an ability to suggest an essential
nobility of character beneath rough Western manners. This ability suited the
parts he played in Ford’s cavalry Westerns right down to the dusty ground.
Though Ford and Wayne
never conceived these pictures as a trilogy, another cavalry Western would help
fill the coffers. Ford's son Patrick said, "He didn't want to make Rio Grande, he didn't
want any part of it. So then there was the compromise, going back and forth:
'Well, I'll tell you what, if I can have my choice of cast in Rio Grande,
I'll make it for you’." Pat Ford said that John Wayne didn't really want
to do it either. "Duke didn't really want to make it. It was just a
job." Both Ford and Wayne wanted to go off to Ireland to film Ford’s
beloved project The Quiet Man and
they needed the cash. Neither really wanted to do another cavalry Western, and
a black & white picture back at penny-pinching Republic was hardly an
enticement. But they bit the bullet and did it. And in fact Rio Grande turned out to be superb, as
good as the other two – and that’s saying something.
It was another Cold
War allegory – very much so – as it dealt with a raid across an international
frontier to hit the enemy just as General MacArthur was trying to persuade
Truman to let him cross the 38th Parallel in hot pursuit. Audiences in the
theaters would have seen newsreels from Korea just before they saw the movie
and the similarities – and message – can’t have escaped them.
Claude Jarman Jr superb as Wayne's son in Rio Grande
But once again it’s
also a wonderful Western in its own right. Although it suffers from the
second-rate Maureen O’Hara as leading lady, the great Ben Johnson and Harry
Carey Jr. are there in force, and Claude Jarman is absolutely superb as Wayne’s
son – among many other things, this is a coming-of-age story.
These three pictures
were in many ways Ford’s masterworks and they were certainly Wayne’s finest
hour – until The Searchers.
There followed a
three-year pause. Wayne had certainly done enough Westerns for the moment. He
was occupied with The Quiet Man and
the likes of Flying Leathernecks and Big Jim McLain.
Hondo
But in 1953 he
returned with Hondo.
For me, Hondo, a Louis
L’Amour story with screenplay by James Edward Grant, is one of the best
Westerns of the 1950s. It was slated for Glenn Ford, who would have been great,
but when he learned that John Farrow would direct, he backed out (they didn’t
get on). Farrow didn’t get on with many people, actually, and he was a poor director
of Westerns. Nevertheless, Hondo is
first class, in many ways what a Western should be. The opening is
astonishingly Shane-like
(Shane came out earlier the same year). A mysterious gunman comes out of
nowhere, arriving at a threatened farm where he is attracted to the farmer’s
wife and bonds with the young son. Quite a coincidence, you must admit.
Hondo: great cast
But in Hondo the stranger is stronger (it’s
Wayne, not the soft Alan Ladd),
there is no husband to get in the way (although we meet him later he is a
rogue, soon disposed of), the wife, Geraldine Page, is better than Jean Arthur
in Shane
(Page was justly nominated for an Oscar for it) and the little boy, Lee Aaker,
is far grittier than the whiny kid in Shane (Brandon de Wilde).
Hondo belongs to the new genre of those hard, adult Westerns of the
early 50s. Hondo has a Winchester with an inscribed plate showing he has won it
for marksmanship, a quotation all fans of Winchester
’73 will recognize. The picture was Wayne’s riposte to the Anthony
Mann/James
Stewart tough-guy oaters. Support acting is excellent, notably Ward Bond as
grizzled Indian scout Buffalo Baker, a perfect role for him (one of 23 films he
made with Wayne), and another Wayne pal, James Arness (still blond) as an
unsympathetic rival, even taller than Wayne. Paul Fix is a major.
Hondo was the second
movie (after Big Jim McLain) of
Wayne’s new company Batjac Productions, set up with Fellows, run for many years by John Wayne’s son
Michael, which would go on to do many of the later and very bankable Wayne
Westerns.
In 1954 Wayne produced
the classy Track of the Cat, a
William A Wellman-directed contemporary Western with a superb Robert Mitchum,
based on the fine novel by Walter van Tilburg Clark, of The
Ox-Bow Incident fame.
And then in 1956 it
was back to John Ford, and The
Searchers.
The Searchers
I regard The Searchers as the masterpiece of both
John Ford and John Wayne. Not everyone does, though, and at the time the film
received lukewarm praise from the critics and was ignored by the Academy
Awards. But in 1989, it was deemed
"culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the
Library of Congress. Today the American Film Institute rates it as the twelfth
greatest American film ever made and the best Western. David Lean, Sam
Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard
and George Lucas have all spoken about how it influenced them. And many, many
people share my opinion of this splendid work.
Towering
From the famous (and
very beautiful) opening scene of Monument Valley framed by the doorway of the
homesteaders’ cabin to the similar final view, we, on the inside looking out,
see Ethan Edwards (Wayne) as the outsider, the man excluded from family and
society. And indeed throughout this powerful film, he is exactly that. In his
finest performance, Wayne shows us a complex character. He is the true
Westerner: he is strong, individualistic and self-sufficient. Yet he is
brutally racist, probably criminal (his illegal activities after the war are
hinted at), and seeks an almost crazed revenge. He is one of the most savage
Western heroes in any film. He is capable of slaying wild animals just so that
Indians starve or shooting out the eyes of an Indian corpse so that “his spirit
wanders forever between the winds” and he finally scalps his quarry. His aim is
not really to recapture the white girls (one has been killed; the other ‘contaminated’)
but to get his mad revenge.
He is actually very
like Scar, his Indian enemy (Henry Brandon). When they face off and trade
insults they are alike. They speak each other’s languages and have suffered
from each other’s brutality.
And yet, and yet...
Ethan Edwards is also an enormously sympathetic character, full of courage,
ability and even nobility. He is implacable yet curiously vulnerable.
“When I looked up at
Duke during rehearsal,” remembered Harry Carey Jr., “it was into the meanest
and coldest eyes I have ever seen. I don’t know how he molded that character.
Perhaps he’d known someone like Ethan Edwards as a kid … He was even Ethan at
dinner time. He didn’t kid around on The
Searchers like he had done on other shows. Ethan was always in his eyes.”
We don’t think of Wayne as a method actor but in The Searchers he came close to that.
The late 50s
Wayne followed The Searchers by producing three
Westerns. First came the fine Seven
Men from Now (Warner Bros, 1956) one of those excellent Randolph Scott/Budd
Boetticher pictures.
Duke, Randy, Budd
Then Gun
the Man Down (United Artists, 1956), a sort of big-screen Gunsmoke spin-off, with James Arness,
directed by Wayne protégé Andrew McLaglen, son of Ford’s favored actor Victor.
In fact Wayne himself was considered for the part of Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, which was moving from radio to
TV, but he turned it down, not wanting to be confined to the small screen. At the
time everything Wayne did was good and made money too. There’s an amusing 1955
intro to the show by Wayne you can watch here.
It’s a typically generous gesture to his friend Arness. And then Escort West (United Artists, 1958), the
last Western of Victor Mature, who was surprisingly good in the genre. The cast
of Escort West was thickly populated with Wayne stock company actors.
Rio Bravo
Wayne had always
wanted to make a major picture celebrating the heroism of the defenders of the
Alamo. For years he had tried to persuade Herb Yates at Republic to finance
one, but Yates would never risk that much capital. Worse, he ripped off Wayne’s
idea and produced his own cut-rate Alamo story, The
Last Command (1955) with Arthur Hunnicutt and Sterling Hayden. Wayne
never forgave Yates, and never made another picture for him. In fact he never spoke to him again. Just as Duke was a loyal
and steadfast friend, so he could be a steely foe.
So Wayne decided he
would make the picture himself. It was a huge budget affair and so he began
putting bankable projects together to finance it, and in ’59 two of these were
another Ford Western, The
Horse Soldiers with William Holden, released in June, but first the
exciting, entertaining and hugely successful Rio
Bravo, at Warners, directed once more by Howard Hawks.
Wayne (and Walter
Brennan) with Hawks in a Western – Red
River rides again? Nope, it wasn’t like that. Rio Bravo was commercial, brash and straight-down-the-line. That’s
why the public loved it. In some ways it was an anti-High
Noon: both Hawks and Wayne disliked High
Noon. Hawks said, "I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go
running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help, and
finally his Quaker wife had to save him. That isn't my idea of a good western
sheriff." Wayne thought in un-American. In their version the marshal
retains his star and doesn’t throw it in the dirt at the end.
Classic later Wayne: Rio Bravo
Quentin Tarantino said
that if he started getting interested in a girl he would show her Rio Bravo.
And she better like it… I kind of see what he means.
It was in Rio Bravo that John Wayne started
wearing that uniform of salmon-pink shirt, leather vest and that splendid hat.
And of course that old yellow-handled 44.40.
It became his standard attire, whatever period the Western was set in, for the next decade or more.
It became his standard attire, whatever period the Western was set in, for the next decade or more.
The Horse Soldiers was a
disappointment, a lackluster cavalry Western which didn’t click. It hardly
seems a John Ford picture at all. Wayne was distracted by plans for The Alamo but was still his professional
self, working hard and doing it right. But Ford was losing it, the story was
not well told and Constance Towers as co-star was very weak.
The Alamo
Wayne and Batjac
didn’t seem to understand that a cast of thousands and some big name stars
don’t on their own add up to much if you don’t have a gripping story and above
all, pacing. The
Alamo moves at the pace of a snail on valium.
A lot of the blame must go to James Edward Grant, Wayne’s preferred writer, friend (although Duke sometimes had to clench his teeth) and in this case associate producer. He came up with a screenplay that is ponderous, turgid and only periodically actionful. Perhaps it was too hard anyway to make that plot into anything beyond the obvious siege and heroic, doomed defense (although other Alamo movies, of which there were many, didn’t do badly). In any case, inventing heroic sallies to destroy artillery or rustle cattle behind enemy lines didn’t help. You just keep wanting Santa Anna to get on with it and start the attack.
A lot of the blame must go to James Edward Grant, Wayne’s preferred writer, friend (although Duke sometimes had to clench his teeth) and in this case associate producer. He came up with a screenplay that is ponderous, turgid and only periodically actionful. Perhaps it was too hard anyway to make that plot into anything beyond the obvious siege and heroic, doomed defense (although other Alamo movies, of which there were many, didn’t do badly). In any case, inventing heroic sallies to destroy artillery or rustle cattle behind enemy lines didn’t help. You just keep wanting Santa Anna to get on with it and start the attack.
Defenders of the Alamo
That’s another weakness: the Mexicans have no character or personality at
all. They are just uniforms to be mown down. Santa Anna (Ruben Padilla) is only
billed 24th in the titles, second to last, and has no lines. At 203 minutes
(director’s cut) Wayne had all the time in the world to develop key characters
like this if he had bothered. Presumably he didn’t think it mattered.
But that’s the main weakness: the 203 minutes. Nearly three and a half hours! OK if it’s gripping, but 'overblown' is the only word here. Even the shortest cut weighs in at a hefty 2 hours 20’. Editor Stuart Gilmore seems to have misplaced his scissors. And it’s so talky, especially the first half. The characters spend the whole time talking about liberty and explaining to the audience how historic their present efforts are going to prove to be. It’s not just implausible, it’s boring – the cardinal sin of the Western.
But that’s the main weakness: the 203 minutes. Nearly three and a half hours! OK if it’s gripping, but 'overblown' is the only word here. Even the shortest cut weighs in at a hefty 2 hours 20’. Editor Stuart Gilmore seems to have misplaced his scissors. And it’s so talky, especially the first half. The characters spend the whole time talking about liberty and explaining to the audience how historic their present efforts are going to prove to be. It’s not just implausible, it’s boring – the cardinal sin of the Western.
How ironic that Herb
Yates’s rip-off B-Western The Last
Command turned out in fact to be better.
The Alamo cost a fortune –
literally, Wayne’s personal fortune. Wayne knew that The Alamo needed to gross $17 million to make any money. It made
$8m. With later sales abroad, and TV rights, it did eventually just about break
even but by then Batjac had sold its interest to pay debts and Wayne reaped no
financial reward.
Poor John Wayne. He
had invested everything, financially and spiritually, to make The Alamo and all he got was a bloated
plodder.
In May 1960 John Wayne
began shooting North
to Alaska with Henry Hathaway, a commitment he had with Fox, as soon as
he had wrapped The Alamo but before
it was released, and he was busy working on his own big picture even between
takes on the new movie. He was also working on setting up The
Comancheros (1961) so it was a bit like juggling, trying to keep all
these projects going at the same time and not drop the ball. But he needed the
money. The Alamo had taken up most of
his reserves and then some. North to
Alaska was a lusty romp set in 1900 in the goldfields round Nome and in
some ways was a trial run for McLintock!
(1963).
Between North to Alaska and The Comancheros Wayne made a cameo appearance as General Sherman
on an episode of Wagon Train directed
by Ford, The
Colter Craven Story. It’s little more than a curiosity. Wayne appears
almost spectral, in deep shadow. He was to return as Sherman in another cameo
in MGM’s lumbering (but successful) How
the West was Won in 1962, in the segment of the movie directed by Ford.
Big 20th
Century Fox budget; beefy, muscular musical theme by Elmer Bernstein; large,
panoramic Utah locations (buttes and mesas) photographed by William Clothier;
Clair Huffaker and James Edward Grant screenplay from a Paul Wellman novel; The
Comancheros had all the hallmarks of a successful John Wayne Western.
But it was actually a big B-movie. It is distinguished, though, by top-class
character actors, notably Jack Elam, Edgar
Buchanan, Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams (his last movie), Bob Steele and Lee
Marvin. It was directed by Michael Curtiz, who never really ‘got’ Westerns and
anyway was ill, poor man. It had been slated for Budd Boetticher. That would
have made all the difference.
The Man who Shot Liberty Valance
Wayne’s last Western
for John Ford is regarded by many, Westernistas and non, as a magnificent
movie. Not by yours truly, though. As far as Wayne goes, though he was the
marksman of the title (as it turns out), his part is low-key and he is really
backing up James Stewart. Myself, I find the black & white picture
studio-bound, old-fashioned, over talky and lacking action – and also rather
bleak. The theme is the dying of the legend, and the movie was that in more
ways than one. Still, there is no denying that many think of The
Man who Shot Liberty Valance as
a great Wayne (and Ford) Western. You pays your money and you makes your own
judgement.
The man who shot him
Wayne worked with Ford
again, on the non-Western Donovan’s Reef,
but never did another Western with his old mentor. Ford did make a last (and
weak) Western, Cheyenne
Autumn, but that starred Richard Widmark. Liberty Valance was the end of a long, long collaboration which had
produced some of the finest Westerns ever made.
Big commercial Westerns
After Circus World, a dreary 1964 picture
which has a vague Western tinge (it’s more of a Wild West show than a circus) Wayne
and Hawks thought that as their pairing had really worked on Rio Bravo. They would try again, with El
Dorado. It was really just a remake of Rio
Bravo. The good guys have to keep the bad guy in jail till the US marshal
gets here and the bad guy’s henchmen are all out there waiting to kill them.
This time Robert
Mitchum gets Dean Martin’s drunk lawman role and James Caan is the
bumptious kid instead of Ricky Nelson. Walter Brennan as the cantankerous old
deputy has been replaced by the nearest equivalent, Arthur Hunnicutt. It was a box-office hit
everywhere it played. But the whole thing was a sloppy, low-grade Western, I’m
afraid, and only worth a DVD purchase if you are a committed Wayne fan or can’t
resist Mitchum or want a fairly nostalgic evening. (Oh, you too?)
The same
year Wayne produced Hondo and the Apaches,
in which two episodes of Batjac’s TV spin-off Hondo were tacked together to make a movie.
Wayne,
in his uniform, spent the rest of the 60s and early 70s making big, lusty,
commercial Westerns, mostly for Batjac. They were undemanding fare but they had
good budgets, straightforward plots, and they were immensely popular in the
theaters.
McLintock! was a sort of Taming of the Western Shrew and is a
picture I don’t care for at all. It has to be said that comedy Westerns weren’t
really Duke’s forte, and this one also starred the dreadful Maureen O’Hara. It
was directed by AV McLaglen, who was second-rate. Some people like it. Well,
they’re welcome.
The
Sons of Katie Elder (not actually
a Batjac picture) in 1965 was way better. Wayne was recovering from quite
drastic cancer surgery. The Western-loving public was holding its breath. Would
he come back as a Western star? Of course he would! With the strength and guts
and work ethic he had, he’d be back in the saddle alright. The Sons of Katie Elder was the first in a whole series of big,
commercial, well-made movies that he made down in his beloved Durango, Mexico,
1965 - 73. It’s big, bold, and self-assured.
His then wife Pilar was dismissive of them:
Looking back, I can barely tell those Durango
films from one another. They had a sameness of story, plot and location which
seemed like a disservice to Duke’s fans. Different casts are the only thing
which made them stand apart.
But in fact she was quite wrong. They had very different stories but
similar casts. Wayne gathered his stock company about him and used them in
successive movies. Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr., Paul Fix, Bruce Cabot, Hank
Worden – the usual suspects. And he used favorites for the crew too. His son
Michael as producer, Carl Anderson as art director, William Clothier and Lucien
Ballard as cinematographers, Burt Kennedy or Andrew V McLaglen to direct.
And they did a good job; they were professionals. The films did well at the
box-office; people liked them. And they fixed Wayne in the mind as a
larger-than-life Western star. These were in many ways the golden years of the
John Wayne Western.
Wayne was John Chisum
The others were The War Wagon, with Kirk Douglas, The Undefeated, with
Rock Hudson, Chisum, Big Jake, with Richard
Boone, The Train Robbers and
Cahill, US Marshal. If
you like your Westerns colorful, noisy and full of action, you’ll go for these.
I do!
True Grit
By now
Wayne was battling a paunch, wearing a toupee and was well into his sixties,
and he was overcoming cancer surgery. It didn’t stop him.
At last,
in 1969, Wayne took a role that suited him, where he could revel in his age and
girth, and could really go for it in a full-blooded performance. And it finally
won him an Oscar. It was, of course, his Rooster Cogburn in True
Grit.
Rooster
The Paramount picture,
directed by Hathaway, was written up by the excellent Marguerite Roberts from
one of the finest ever Western novels, True
Grit by Charles Portis. Actually,
Portis’s Rooster was only in his forties but Wayne and Hathaway went for broke.
This Rooster is elderly, cantankerous, drunken, loud and at least half rogue.
Much of the Wayne theology is desecrated yet it doesn’t seem to matter and he
gets away with it. He is a drunkard. He is ready to shoot a man from ambush and
rob the dead. He’s doing it all for the money. These are not standard Western
hero traits, and certainly not Ducal ones. It’s a truly wonderful
performance by Wayne and if ever an actor deserved an Oscar it was John Wayne.
He finally got his Oscar. His acceptance speech was underwhelming - watch it on YouTube
Everyone loves this
film. Quite right too: it’s outstanding.
The last years
Writer Leigh Brackett
had done Rio
Bravo and had been obliged by Hawks and Wayne to plagiarize herself
on El Dorado.
Now the poor woman was made to do it yet again in 1970 with Rio Lobo.
Hawks said, "When you find out a thing that goes pretty well, you might as
well do it again."
Robert Mitchum turned it down. After reading the script, he said it was "an even bigger piece of crap than El Dorado." I fear he was right. Hawks himself was honest about it. "I didn't think it was any good," he said. A perceptive man, Hawks. It does have saving graces. There's a lively sub-Rio Bravo shoot-out at the end. There's some nice William Clothier photography of Mexico and Old Tucson locations, and quite a stirring Jerry Goldsmith score (and lovely guitar music over the titles). And there's a good performance by cranky old Jack Elam with his shotgun, doing his Walter Brennan act (actually, he was a decade younger than Wayne). But really, they should have stopped at Rio Bravo.
Robert Mitchum turned it down. After reading the script, he said it was "an even bigger piece of crap than El Dorado." I fear he was right. Hawks himself was honest about it. "I didn't think it was any good," he said. A perceptive man, Hawks. It does have saving graces. There's a lively sub-Rio Bravo shoot-out at the end. There's some nice William Clothier photography of Mexico and Old Tucson locations, and quite a stirring Jerry Goldsmith score (and lovely guitar music over the titles). And there's a good performance by cranky old Jack Elam with his shotgun, doing his Walter Brennan act (actually, he was a decade younger than Wayne). But really, they should have stopped at Rio Bravo.
In 1972 Duke made a
Western for Warners that I am rather fond of, The
Cowboys. In it, he recruits a bunch of kids to be drovers and though it
may sound a bit cheesy, it isn’t at all. It’s a gritty, tough Western. And
what’s more Duke is shot in it, and killed. He’d never died on screen before
(except in The Alamo, where he had
to) and the brutal killing here, done by that splendid villain Bruce Dern,
comes by no means in the last reel. It was a real shock to audiences at the
time. It’s a good little picture and definitely quality Wayne.
Shock: Dern kills the Duke
In 1975 Wayne thought
he’d have another go at Rooster, and made Rooster
Cogburn, a sort of Western African
Queen with Katharine Hepburn, produced by Hal Wallis again. The director
was Stuart Millar, who tried valiantly to follow Henry Hathaway but clearly
wasn’t in the same league. He had been a producer of Little
Big Man but Rooster Cogburn
was his only Western as director. Wayne as Rooster launches into the part with
even more gusto than he did for Hathaway – in fact he comes dangerously near to
overacting. Hepburn as Goodnight does her Hepburn act, grande dame with, as Rooster says, all that wah wah accent. There are a couple of moments which work well –
Hepburn reciting the 23rd Psalm as Jordan shoots at her feet, or wetting the
foresight of her Winchester with her finger prior to shooting one of the bad
guys. But all in all, it was a bit of a clunker, and only a pale imitation of True Grit.
Fortunately it was not
to be the Duke’s last Western.
The Shootist
The
Shootist (Paramount, 1976),
John Wayne’s last movie, is a fine picture on many levels. It is an excellent
film, with memorable performances by Wayne, James Stewart and Lauren Bacall in
particular. It is too an excellent Western, with a showdown in the saloon where
the hero does what a man’s gotta do, using his six-shooter against the bad guys
though outnumbered. But most of all it is a poignant picture for us viewers
because it deals with a man dying of cancer and it was the swansong of a man
who had suffered from cancer and in a short space of time would die from it.
A fine portrait
You might also say
that its theme was the end of the West. JB Books (Wayne) is a dinosaur, a Wild
West gunfighter out of his time and with nowhere to go. And by the mid-70s the
Western movie was in full decline too. It seemed almost an anachronism. So the
whole tone of the piece is elegiac. It’s a farewell.
Adieu
John Wayne said,
looking back on his career, “I’ve played the kind of man I’d like to have
been.” He knew it was all make-believe, of course he did. He also said, “I’ve
had the most appealing of lives. I’ve been lucky enough to portray man against
the elements at the same time as there was always someone there to bring me
orange juice.” This seems to me to be typically wry and modest of Wayne. Wayne’s
son Michael said, “He wasn’t a cowboy or a rancher; he was a movie star. He
wasn’t a hero; he was a movie star. But for many people, he was a symbol of
America.”
That’s undeniable.
I personally think, as
an ardent Western fan, that he was a truly great Western actor, and I also
think that the contribution he made to the Western genre will never be
surpassed.