John Wayne's First 100 Years
by Spencer Warren

The hero of heroes, from an age when movie heroes really were bigger than life, the “Duke,” John Wayne, was born one hundred years ago, on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa. The son of a pharmacist, young Marion Morrison later moved with his family to California, where he studied at USC. What was more natural than for a big, handsome kid to go into the young movie industry, and thus Wayne started as an extra in films in 1926.

He got a big break when he was cast in the lead as Breck Coleman in the epic Western, The Big Trail, in 1930. An unusually lanky, fresh-faced 23-year-old Wayne leads a wagon train on its epic journey from Missouri to the promised land of California, conquering fierce weather, bleak plains, vast rivers, mighty mountains and, of course, hordes of Indians, not to mention treachery among the evil varmints hiding out among the brave pioneers. Self-consciously grand in conception, The Big Trail embodies the heroic themes of the Western legend (the pre-1960s traditional Western, that is) – the hardy pioneers doggedly overcoming one obstacle after another as they tame, settle and civilize a wild continent, led by the quiet man of strength, who is always courtly toward women and reluctant to draw his gun, but, once aroused, is deadly with his aim.

This picture was a hugely ambitious undertaking for the early days of talking pictures, which had replaced silents only the year before. Seen today, the film understandably creaks a bit, but it still packs a wallop in the newly restored two and a half hour, 70 mm. print. Directed by Raoul Walsh, this very early experiment in wide screen filmmaking remained unique until the development of standard wide-screen films in the 1950s. It classic scenes – the wagon train forming a circle for defense against the Indian attack, Wayne tracking down the murderous villain in a swirling snowstorm, the pioneers, set against the verdant panorama of the promised land, on their knees giving thanks to the Almighty for delivering them through all their perils, and the hero finally uniting with his beloved, their embrace framed by giant redwood trees. These essentials of the classic Western have never been more grandly realized on screen, and remind us this is the true conservative movie genre.

The young Wayne is very good and manages to carry much of this epic on his shoulders. But the film was not financially successful and big budget Westerns went into eclipse during the Depression. For the rest of the decade, Wayne toiled in relative obscurity as a star of B-Westerns, the cheaply made one hour films that formed double bills with the big pictures in movie theaters. He even became a singing cowboy!

He was rescued by the central figure in his career, director John Ford, in the 1939 classic Stagecoach. This tale of the interaction of a motley group of passengers on a dangerous journey through Indian country lifted the Western genre back into the top rank, where it reigned supreme for the next quarter century. Wayne is the Ringo Kid, who joins the stagecoach while on the run from the law. He falls for the prostitute with a heart of gold, Dallas (Claire Trevor) and stands by her against the hostility of the others. Once the Indians attack (as thrilling an action sequence as ever filmed, under Ford’s commanding direction), Wayne climbs on to the stagecoach roof, firing away with his repeater and, needless to say, making every shot count. Finally rescued by the cavalry, the stage arrives at its destination, the town of Lordsburg. Here Wayne does what a man has to do: alone, he goes after the three evil Plummer brothers, killers of his brother. They have it out on the dark, deserted main street. This entire Lordsburg sequence is an excellent illustration of Ford’s genius as a director; its build-up to the climactic confrontation embodies much of the essence of the classic Western, only it is presented on a loftier, more intense level than might be expected by those who have seen only the many pale, cliché-like imitations in lesser films and television programs like Gunsmoke. Just as the shooting starts, Ford cuts to Dallas, nervously waiting for her man’s return, hearing the gunfire off in the distance. Then, with Ford’s camera remaining on Dallas, Wayne returns to her out of the night, and they clinch. This kind of dramatic subtlety, which leaves the violence offscreen, in the viewer’s imagination, is not often found in movies nowadays.

Thanks to the great success of Stagecoach, Wayne was now back in “A” pictures to stay, but he was a second-rank star, not in the top category of the Clark Gables or Errol Flynns. Once the war came, many of these stars enlisted, but Wayne never signed up. He was deferred based on his age and number of dependent children. This, however, did not stop others joining, and it obviously clashes with what became his patriotic, super-hero image. Ford, who did volunteer, aged 46, and was wounded at the Battle of Midway (see http://acuf.org/issues/issue85/070603med.asp), always held this against Wayne. After the war, Ford built a club for veterans near Los Angeles called the Field Photo Memorial Farm (named for the Navy unit he headed), where he would stage elaborate Memorial Day observances and Christmas parties. Wayne was not invited.

During the war, Wayne fought the enemy in films like Flying Tigers (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1944) and They Were Expendable (1945). In the latter he played a PT-boat commander in the Pacific opposite Robert Montgomery, who in real life had done exactly that.

The film that launched him to the top and set his image for all time was Howard Hawks’s cattle- drive epic Red River (1948). Wayne is Thomas Dunson, who leaves the wagon train to strike out on his own and found a cattle empire in pre-Civil War Texas. The two best scenes come early. In the first, Wayne turns away the desperate entreaties of his girl (Coleen Gray) that he take her with him when he leaves the relative safety of the wagon train. “Put your arms around me, feel how strong I am,” she pleads desperately, adding he won’t be working with the cattle at night. Intensely directed by Hawks, scenes like this show how films used to be more erotic than today’s fare precisely because the actors kept their clothes on. She is dwarfed in Wayne’s farewell embrace, then he pushes her away, stoically turns his back, mounts his horse, and rides off to find his destiny.

In the second scene, one that became a Wayne specialty, he finds the perfect land, untouched, where he will start his beef empire. Whereupon two Mexicans ride up, claiming unpersuasively that the land is owned by their boss, hundreds of miles away in Mexico. This doesn’t sit well with Wayne. After a few words one of the Mexicans starts to draw, but before he knows it he’s lying dead on the ground, Wayne’s bullet in his heart. Wayne orders the second Mexican to go home and tell his boss the land is now Wayne’s.

Red River established Wayne’s persona as the Achilles of the Western, the indomitable, warrior with the deep voice who never flinches, never doubts, indestructible to the end. Here he drives his men against rustlers, Indians and nature, until they revolt against him. The film also made famous the unique Wayne stride, his rolling hips relentlessly driving forward his big 6’4-1/2” frame. One of his iconic images is found in the finale, as he marches through the cattle herd to do battle with his adopted protégé, Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift), whom he feels has betrayed him.

Wayne next starred in Ford’s three cavalry films of the late forties, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950). Yellow Ribbon gave him one of his most interesting roles, as he plays an older man, Captain Nathan Brittles, commanding an important scouting patrol as an Indian war threatens, in his final days before retirement. He also starred for Ford at this time as the leader of a trio of bank robbers who redeem themselves, saving a newborn whose mother has just given birth and died in the desert, in 3 Godfathers (1948). This gives Wayne one of his best lines when, told by the judge at his trial that sentence will be suspended if he surrenders custody of the baby, he refuses, saying in his inimitable slow drawl: “I ain’t gonna break a promise to a dyin’ woman.”

Wayne followed these Westerns with one of the two roles for which he was nominated as best actor, the tough-love Sergeant Stryker, shepherding his boys through hell in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). This is a pretty standard war film of its period, which employed the three survivors of the famous raising of the Stars and Stripes on the island in 1945. It lacks the ambition and emotional/thematic depth that top directors like Ford and Hawks brought to Wayne’s films.

Ford directed Wayne’s best non-Western, The Quiet Man (1952). Filmed on location in the Emerald Isle in rich Techicolor, Wayne plays a retired American boxer, Sean Thornton, who returns to the ancestral home to try and find peace. He runs into the strict dowry marriage customs and the skinflint, bullying brother (Victor McLaglen) of the lass he fancies, Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara). The plot is merely a vehicle for Ford to pour out his love for his ancestral home in his peerless, lyrical style. Among many breathtaking shots is the first one of Mary Kate, a country girl tending sheep in a field as Wayne spots her from the road; it is one of the most stunning images of chaste, female beauty ever put on screen.

Wayne’s greatest role and greatest film – by general agreement – is Ford’s 1956 Western, The Searchers. He plays Ethan Edwards, an Achilles-like warrior – “The Man Who Knows Indians” -- embarked on a seven-year quest to rescue his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), who was kidnapped when Comanches massacred her family. Ethan, a driven loner who never could settle down, becomes engulfed by his violent nature and desire for revenge: he becomes a mirror image of the chief, Scar, whom he is pursuing. This pursuit becomes increasingly maniacal because Ethan is enraged by the knowledge that Debbie, now grown, will have been taken as a squaw by a “buck.” His rage becomes inflamed to the point he is bent on killing Debbie as well as wreaking revenge on Scar.

The Searchers thus represents the growing complexity of films in the 1950s. Ethan frighteningly displays the under-side of the Western hero’s talent for violence, upon which the security of the frontier community depends. I suspect this film’s renown – especially among the majority of critics, who are left-wing – is in some measure attributable to its racial theme (Ethan scalps Scar when he finally kills him). More important, Ford’s visual sweep makes the first forty minutes among the grandest ever put on screen. But the powerful feeling of the homesteaders’ modest outpost of civilization surrounded by the uncontrolled savagery of the wilderness (the Western as metaphor for America’s place in the real world is obvious to us today) tends to become dissipated by the episodic plot and Ford’s characteristic digressions into humor. I think Ford was trying to do more thematically than the traditional plot structure allows; this film may have been ahead of its time.

Nonetheless, Ford’s subtle, indirect treatment of violence offers an important lesson for our contemporary unrestrained culture. Ethan’s brother’s family has been left alone on their farm while Ethan and the Texas Rangers have gone off chasing after what proves to be a Comanche ruse. It is night and the sounds of the wilderness make the family fearful; they shut the windows and send little Debbie alone, holding her doll, to hide at the family graveyard. Here she is engulfed by the shadow of Chief Scar; looking down on her, he lifts his horn and blows a loud signal. Ford then cuts abruptly to Ethan, who, having realized he’s been deceived by the Comanches, is galloping back the forty miles to the homestead. Suddenly he rears in his horse as he sights the homestead from a promontory and Max Steiner's urgent music falls silent. Then the music resumes with a cry of horror, and Ethan looks down upon the farm—engulfed in flames. Reaching the scene, he calls out forlornly through the smoke for his sister-in-law, "Martha. Martha." He lifts a piece of a torn blouse. Next, from inside the dark shed, Ford frames a shot of Ethan looking in from the outside. He enters, looks inside, then halts, dropping his head in horror. (Photographed in silhouette, this is one of countless shots in Ford's movies that could be freeze-framed and hung in an art gallery.) Going back outside, he orders the late-arriving nephew, Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), "Don't go in there. Don't go in." He has to slug the boy to stop him. The scene ends as Ethan picks up Debbie’s doll, which he finds at the burial ground.

Showing only one Indian, with little dialogue and absolutely no actual violence, Ford (assisted by the great Steiner's musical gift for heightening drama) creates a deeply disturbing, shocking picture of savagery, rape, and pillage. (For the difference between such artistic imagination and earthbound literalism, compare this sequence with Clint Eastwood's direction of the massacre of his family in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).)

Ethan now sets out in pursuit of the Comanche band, accompanied only by Martin and Brad (Harry Carey, Jr.), who was "bespoken" to the older sister, Lucy, who also was kidnapped. Following some magnificent long shots of the trio set against the epic buttes and mesas of Utah's Monument Valley (whose spectacular landscape Ford loved to use as a grand stage for his Westerns), they come upon a set of tracks that have cut away from the rest. This concerns the experienced warrior Ethan, and he rides off alone, telling the others to stay put. Shortly thereafter he returns, dismounts and falls to the ground, silent, disturbed, even disoriented (most unusual for the implacable Wayne). Martin asks, "You all right?" "Why did they break off?" Then he notices that Ethan's "Johnny Reb" coat is gone. "Huh?" responds Ethan. "I'm not going back there." They ride off and later, Brad excitedly claims he has spotted Lucy in the Indian camp off in the distance "wearing that blue dress." Ethan slowly answers: "What you saw wasn't Lucy. What you saw was a buck wearing Lucy's dress. I found Lucy back in the canyon. Wrapped her in my coat. Buried her with my own hands." Brad shouts, "Did they...? Was she...?" Ethan yells: "What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture? Spell it out?" His voice breaking, he pleads: "Don't ever ask me. As long as you live, don't ever ask me more." Hysterical, Brad runs off toward the Indian camp: we hear a rifle shot and know that the savage wilderness has claimed yet another victim.

This is the biggest scene of Wayne’ career and, ironically, it is one where he shows vulnerability. Few experts will agree with my criticism of the film, but we all agree on the unusual intensity, the fire in Wayne’s performance. More than usual, he is the character he plays, not just John Wayne. The Searchers also gives Wayne one of his iconic lines, whose rhythm matches his distinctive mode of speaking and which he repeats a number of times, whenever he is challenged by Martin: “That’ll be the day.” It became a hit Buddy Holly song. The film’s iconic scene is Wayne’s most famous: in the final shot, he is left standing alone outside, as the homesteaders, reunited with Debbie, happily enter back into their cabin. He grabs his right arm and turns back to the wilderness; this protector of civilization himself is not suited to it.

Wayne was the number one box office star through much of the 1950’s. His next excellent film was Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959), which gave him perhaps his best screen name, Sheriff John T. Chance (as well as his sexiest leading lady, the young, then brunette, Angie Dickinson).. His final Western with Ford, and Ford’s last masterpiece, was in 1962, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, opposite James Stewart. By now, the aging Ford was becoming disillusioned. Wayne once more is the noble embodiment of the selfless Western hero – Tom Doniphon -- who saves the community and civilization from the savagery of the wilderness (with Lee Marvin’s crazy Valance substituting for the Comanches). But Wayne loses his love (Vera Miles) to the Eastern dude lawyer (Stewart) and dies obscurity. Instead, Stewart rides his mythical heroics – in truth, Wayne’s -- all the way to the U.S. Senate. The famous line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” actually is ironical if not bitter. Wayne here is the tragic hero, in his most sympathetic role.

In the meantime, Wayne had produced and directed himself (as Davy Crockett) in his epic, The Alamo (1960). He saw this as a big patriotic effort at the height of the Cold War. But the main value of the film is that his weak direction helps one appreciate the artistry of Ford and Hawks.

Wayne continued starring in Westerns and some dramas through the 1960s. His illustrious presence was like a rock in a storm as counter-culture movies began to overtake Hollywood; the amoral Sergio Leone Italian “revisionist” Westerns starring Clint Eastwood became the new face of the genre Wayne had made his own. He made two more films with Hawks, of which El Dorado (1967) is one of the last really good traditional Westerns ever made. The last such really good movie Western and Wayne’s final classic role, which won him the Best Actor Oscar, is True Grit (1969). Wayne brilliantly makes his self-parody as the aging, boozing, fat marshal, Rooster Cogburn, patch over one eye, come off simultaneously as a serious Western. The last iconic scene of his long career has him, on horseback, reins in his mouth, taking on single-handed the villainous gang led by the always superb Robert Duvall. He orders the evildoers to dismount and hand over their guns, to which Duvall taunts, “That’s mighty big talk for a one-eyed fat man.” Whereupon Wayne roars, “Fill your hand, you sonofabitch,” and, guns blazing, he fells each of his youthful antagonists.

Most of Wayne’s final films are decent but forgettable. He kept turning them out – one or two a year – because he needed the money, having been married three times with seven children. His controversial 1968 Vietnam movie, The Green Berets, which is like his World War II-era movies only transplanted to Vietnam, earned hoots of derision from the liberal movie critics. Seen today, its view of the war seems a lot closer to the historical truth than theirs. (His record as a leader of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950’s is more mixed, as many innocents became swept up in a legitimate effort to expose the smaller number of secret communists, like Dalton Trumbo, who did insert their propaganda into films.)

Wayne was killed for the first time as a star in The Cowboys (1972). He did an amusing reprise of Rooster Cogburn opposite the one and only Katharine Hepburn in the film of that name, his penultimate movie in 1975. In his last film, The Shootist (1976), he plays himself: a visibly aging, fading giant, who has come to what he thinks is a quiet town to die from the cancer eating out his insides, only to be shot down in a saloon by a kid out to make a name, a victim of his own legend.

Wayne died in 1979, aged 72, of cancer. In 1955, while filming in Utah one of his worst movies, The Conqueror, in which he played Genghis Khan, Wayne and the rest of the film company were exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests that had been conducted in Nevada. In addition to Wayne, co-star Susan Hayward and director Dick Powell, an unusually large number of the cast and crew all later contracted or died of cancer. There is some credible evidence that their exposure may have been the cause. On the other hand, Wayne had smoked three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and drank heavily. Initially, he had “beaten the ‘Big C’”, lung cancer, in the 1960’s. He succumbed to lung and stomach cancer.

In an era dominated by movie icons who were bigger than life, John Wayne was – and is – the biggest of them all. In a sense, those stars served some of the function of ancient gods in Greek myths; they represented ideal moral types whom we looked up to for inspiration. And Wayne was the embodiment of that most American – and, from our own perspective -- most conservative of genres, the Western. In our post-1960’s era of extreme relativism and radical egalitarianism, many movie stars represent everyman, or lower. And the movie Western is virtually dead. But, thanks to film, Wayne – eternally young -- and the ideals of the many wonderful Westerns he helped make possible are still there to lift our eyes skyward.

Readers may be interested in a wonderful memoir of Wayne and John Ford, Company of Heroes, by the actor Harry Carey, Jr.

Spencer Warren selected and co-hosted a month-long series of conservative films on Turner Classic Movies in 2000.