John Wayne.

I've just rented The Quiet Man and How Green Was My Valley tonight.

Tad must be talking about Rio Bravo! (Another great film.) Speaking of Hawks/Wayne, AMC was showing Hatari! about ten times a day for a month not long ago. I managed to watch the whole thing in dribs and drabs.

I'm sort of ambivalent about Wayne still--and a lot of my friends can't countenance him. There's a lot of accumulated legend and counterlegend and parody and self-parody to overcome before you can appreciate his talents. Also he seemed to be somewhere between clueless and despicable as a human being.

"Truly that was the Son of Gawd."

I'm sort of not a fan, but I love quite a lot of his movies anyway. In some sort of order: The Searchers, Rio Bravo, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Red River, El Dorado, Fort Apache, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach. (Wasn't the first of Ford's cavalry trilogy My Darling Clementine? He wasn't in that, was he?)

Pretty much sums it up.

But it isn't a BAD thing.

I actually think there was a good deal of deliberateness/guile to "John Wayne" (the star)--if you see one of his earliest films you'll notice that hardly any of the poses, intonations, etc. we've come to associate with "John Wayne" are in place. I definitely agree that by those Hawks films you mention, he was coasting on his established persona for the most part.

Here's a helpful exercise, which I hope we can take to with all seriousness. Try to answer these questions: What do you think were the qualities that made Wayne, in the 40s through the 60s, just a huge star? What attracted people to him?

Quiet Man's more fun though, and leave me feeling better after watching it.

***QUOTE***
John Wayne arrived in a tux with two bodyguards, another guy and two ladies in evening gowns - all very drunk.
Reaching the steps, he grabbed me, picked me up and started slapping me on the back, shouting, "I saw you in Egypt and you were great...and then you blew me!"
I took an immediate dislike to the guy.

*snip*

The place was packed. When I got up on stage to begin the last set, I announced: "Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, it's Halloween. We were going to have some important guests here tonight - we were expecting George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party - unfortunately, he couldn't make it - but here's John Wayne."
As soon as I said that, he got up from his table, stumbled onto the dance floor, and started to make a speech. I leaned the microphone down so everyone could hear it; something along the lines of "- and if I'm elected, I promise to..." At that point, one of his bodyguards grabbed him and made him sit down.

*snip*

I had to pass his table on my way out. As I went by, he got up and smashed my hat down on top of my head. I took it off and popped it back out. This apparently annoyed him, as he shouted, "You don't like the way I fix hats? I've been fixin' hats for forty years." I put it back on my head and he smashed it down again. I said, "I'm not even gonna give you a chance to apologize," and walked out.
***UNQUOTE***

Of the many disappointments I have with the DVD (I'd love to see all the TV edits they added and subtracted) the commentary for that line is a riot.

Did anyone ever see that photo of John Wayne wearing short shorts and espadrilles? RIP Spy.

He was a big leggy, wasn't he?

Shouldn't that be 'Ally'?

Godard once said something like, "I hate J.W. when I see him on TV campaigning for Goldwater but I love him like family when I see him reach down and pick up Natalie Wood at the end of 'The Searchers.'"

Building the Duke, Film by Film

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

JOHN WAYNE was born 100 years ago this month —“born ready,” presumably, because that’s what the men he played in the movies liked to say, and those men never lied. The whole point of the character Wayne embodied in something like 150 pictures, the overwhelming majority of them westerns and war movies, was that there was no mystery to him at all: What you saw was what you got, and if you didn’t like it, tough.

The Duke made pretty sure you’d like it, though. He once told an interviewer: “When I started, I knew I was no actor, and I went to work on this Wayne thing. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint and a way of moving meant to suggest that I wasn’t looking for trouble but would just as soon throw a bottle at your head as not. I practiced in front of a mirror.”

That self-invention, the shtick-by-shtick construction of the Wayne thing, turned out to be the only really strenuous exercise of creative imagination he’d ever need to perform. It worked, and it kept on working for nearly half a century; Wayne, conservative by nature, never saw any reason to mess with it much.

And 28 years after his death it still works, albeit less potently than it did in the years following World War II, when Wayne seemed to most of the planet the epitome of American virtue — or, at least, American power. He was large (a brawny 6 feet 4 inches), conscientious, forthright, open-hearted and dangerous when crossed. (He was also, of course, white and flagrantly heterosexual.) On the occasion of his centennial, though, let’s cut the big fella some slack, forget what he was supposed to stand for — back off, you fancy-pants sociologists — and celebrate instead the improbable durability of his appeal, which has managed to survive both his own death and that of the national self-image he willingly incarnated.

The home-video outfits that control most of the Wayne catalog have been furiously clearing their vaults, repackaging and gift-boxing previously released films, and preparing DVDs of the “special,” “deluxe” and “collector’s” variety, in an effort to catch what might be the last ridable wave of Dukemania in our lifetimes. (Marketers are born ready too.) Warner Home Video has a six-disc “John Wayne Film Collection,” which, enterprisingly, contains only movies that haven’t been on domestic DVD before, and you’ll know why. Paramount is issuing a hefty “John Wayne Century Collection,” consisting of 14 pictures, most from the later stages of his career. Lionsgate, which owns the rights to the early films he made for Republic, is offering a couple of four-disc gift sets and, with some duplication, half a dozen “John Wayne Double Features.” And Wayne fanciers may now purchase a new two-disc Special Edition of Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” (1959); a Deluxe Edition of “The Cowboys” (1972); and a Special Collector’s Edition of “True Grit” (1969), which is also included in the Paramount box.

There’s no special — or deluxe, or even collector’s — reason to mosey out and fill your saddlebags with all this virile stuff. But if you’ve a mind to, and play the movies more or less randomly, you might find yourself kind of awestruck by the sheer ingenuity and adaptability of the Wayne thing: this jury-rigged contraption that somehow succeeded, with practically no maintenance and only the tiniest adjustments, in turning out the same product over and over again and always (well, almost always) leaving the customer satisfied.

I don’t mean to denigrate his acting ability: most stars of his era operated in a similar way, establishing a recognizable persona and deviating from it only under the duress of box-office decline or unfulfilled Oscar cravings. Wayne was unusual in the simplicity of his rugged-individualist persona — he was a living reproach to the very idea of complexity — and in the ease with which he wore it, like that battered, funky-looking old cowboy hat he sported in picture after picture.

And that ease is really quite an achievement, especially considering that for at least the last three decades of his screen life Wayne was representing the essence of American masculinity to the entire free world: a burden that would probably make most guys a little tense. The Duke, miraculously, seems never to have suffered from performance anxiety. He managed to look comfortable in his own skin even when that skin began to wrinkle and sag and to become, as it did in the ’60s and ’70s, more voluminous. Time isn’t kind to male action heroes; it exposes the vulnerabilities they’re not supposed to have. But when middle age hit Wayne, he took the punch and barely seemed fazed. It’s as if he believed he could lick time as he’d licked everything else that had come at him —Indians, the Japanese Army and Navy and all the many mean varmints with quick guns who’d tried and failed to put a fatal bullet hole in that weathered hat.

In some peculiar way his famous conservatism actually functioned as an aesthetic for him: He performed as if nothing, including John Wayne, ever would, or should, change. This is an odd principle for an actor; the ability to transform oneself is, at least theoretically, what the profession is about. And Wayne’s orneriness (we call it denial now) wound up producing a startling sort of disconnect between his screen persona and his creative practice. He always played the bold, two-fisted hero, but he chose his roles — and, in later life, often his directors and his co-stars too — with the cautiousness of a scared homesteader.

And yet. I’ve been speaking of Wayne abstractly because he was, by his own choice, something of an abstraction. But he couldn’t have lasted so long if he were no more than an idea. This distinctly mixed bag of centennial DVD issues and reissues serves as a useful reminder that Wayne was, for all his limitations, a remarkably vivid presence on the screen and at his best an actor of surprising dexterity. (“Subtlety” might be going too far; he’d probably consider the word vaguely effeminate anyway.)

One of the Lionsgate boxes features John Ford’s elegant, discreetly rousing “Rio Grande” (1950), in which Wayne gives a movingly restrained performance as an Indian-fighting cavalry officer trying to reconnect with a wife and a son he hasn’t seen for years. In John Farrow’s “Hondo” (1953), Wayne does a sensationally charismatic, slightly menacing, turn as a self-possessed loner wandering the West in the company of an evil-tempered dog. (The movie — whose hurtling climactic sequence was directed not by Farrow, but by Ford — is like a swifter, less self-conscious version of “Shane.”) And he’s fascinating to watch even in Richard Wallace’s sluggish “Tycoon” (1947), in the Warner collection, because his driven, obsessed civil engineer is practically a rehearsal for his driven, obsessed cattle rancher in Hawks’s “Red River” (1948), which proved to be the strongest performance of his career.

But the best way to understand John Wayne’s persistent popularity is to watch “Rio Bravo,” in which he plays Sheriff John T. Chance, defending his beleaguered jailhouse with the aid of a drunk (Dean Martin), a gimpy old man (Walter Brennan), a very young gunman (Ricky Nelson) and a shady lady (Angie Dickinson). He’s now on the wrong side of 50 and getting hefty, but he radiates good-humored serenity as he wrangles his motley crew of helpers, trades innuendo with leggy Angie and totes his rifle on his nightly rounds of the rowdy town. His trademark walk is looser-hipped than ever, the hat is pretty much a disgrace and he looks irresistibly happy. It’s a voluptuously, almost sinfully, relaxed performance, a kind of offhand apotheosis of the aging but still viable Wayne thing.

“Rio Bravo” is, like many Hawks pictures, an idyll, a neverland in which nothing matters except friendship, wit, sex and professional competence. The constant, testing question is “Are you good enough?” It’s a perfect setting for a fantastic, semimythological creature like the Duke to cavort in. Wayne may have started with a gimmick, but give him his due: For 50 years on the screen he was always — and in the full, Hawksian sense of the words — good enough.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Pretty patronizing stuff.

OK, so I saw a pic of him very early in his career and he actually was sort of hot at one time.

http://i.imdb.com/Photos/Mptv/1303/3930_0010.jpg

Not that one.

I'm a dedicated carnivore, but Wayne is too much beef for one mouth.

xpost to original years old post- i didn't like the quiet man movie because it wasn't true to the original story. quiet man was this wee tiny guy not 6' 5" john wayne. it soured me right from the beginning.

sorry if this has been covered already.

well "he was one of the good ones", I assume

agree that the dead are less problematic, you aren't supporting them financially for one thing

Haven’t read the whole thing yet and am still more of a Red River than Searchers guy, but yeah.

herself ("she" for the strict anglicans) is just after reading didion's piece on him over several meetings around the filming of katie elder and was surprised by the gentleness with which she treats the subject

Damn that was excellent.

And like Mrs Dmac I was struck by the gentleness of the Didion interview too. Quite unexpected.

I like that

I wonder if Duke ever found out that Ford was likely bisexual (as Maureen O'Hara did)

When the Ward Bond rehabilitation comes I'm gonna kill myself

Feel like I just read something unsavory about him in Me Cheeta.

According to all accounts he was an obnoxious loud-mouthed reactionary asshole. Nobody liked him except for John Wayne, who was his bestie.

Good actor though

Just found this in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, by David Thomson:

But that begins to take us into his strange career as boaster, bully, boozer, and member of the unwholesome John Ford gang. As such, there are many stories about Bond’s stupidity, his uncouthness, and his being the butt of jokes—and sadly these are more entertaining than many of the films he made. Which is not to say that Bond was a hopeless case:

he made Wayne look like a mild Red-basher

I've given The Searchers about six chances; still think it's as overlit, broadly written and acted, and pokily directed as I did twenty years ago. I've given up because Ford and Duke made at least four better cowboy films less revered.

That has more or less been my experience as well

Speaking of Ward Bond, do yourselves a favor and don't do a deep dive looking into Walter Brennan. Hoo-boy, what an asshole...

with or without teeth?

Both!

5th-best Ford-Wayne western is still pretty good

I liked The Searchers the one and only time I saw it years ago. The only thing that threw me was the goofy mid-film fight scene (Jonathan Lethem's amazing essay on the film had already defended/contextualized the racial stuff for me). But yeah, of the Ford/Wayne collabs I've seen, Fort Apache is at least as good and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is definitely superior.

Has anyone seen either of the films Wayne made as a (co-)director? Are they as embarrassing as rumoured?

Has anyone seen either of the films Wayne made as a (co-)director? Are they as embarrassing as rumoured?

The Green Berets is. The Alamo is only embarrassing as an Oscar contender, which is what Wayne campaigned for it to be.

I like The Searchers the way I like Blood Meridian. It’s depressing & violent & I wouldn’t ever casually recommend it but there’s something sort of mythological/biblical about it that I really like & that keeps me watching it every now and then. goth-western? idk.

the searchers is not a perfect film, but i think wayne's performance in it is just as good as everyone says. the character as written is meant to be fairly mysterious and contradictory, and he conveys that really well. ward bond is pretty good in it too. definitely some fairly weak attempts at comic relief in there, but mostly what i remember is the incredible bleakness of so much of it, especially toward the beginning. wayne's quiet reaction to realizing that his brother's family has been brutally killed is probably his most moving on-screen moment.

Did anyone (else) read the Scott Eyman boo?

I mean the lionization of The Searchers is largely in part due to its messiness. Ford certainly made more airtight Westerns, but this is the one that broke things apart. Occupies a space similar to Vertigo in my eyes. Not one that succeeds as much in the ways the more straight genre films did, but ultimately the most interesting.

xp I read the Scott Eyman bio. Thought it was good, it revealed sides to the man I wasn't aware of. I read it back-to-back with the Bob Hope bio by Richard Zoglin, so that was an interesting comparison.

man, I love Hope (thru the mid '50s) but his life sounded fairly dull (aside from the infidelities), so I didn't read that.

I learned a great term from that Eyman bio, dog heavy, meaning the under assistant West Coast Promotion Man to the main heavy, who comes out and kicks the dog.

What’d you think of the Hope bio?

xp Yes that struck me as a conspicuous difference between him and Wayne. Duke had actual hobbies and interests and you could imagine that sharing a drink with him would be enjoyable. Hope had an incredible work ethic (especially when younger) but beyond that there's a blankness. One image that sticks is the fact that his house was strewn with all his honorary awards and photos of him with US presidents. That's what he cared about. I don't think he even drank (father was a bad alcoholic).

xp!
I was sort of intrigued by that one but yeah figured he was kind of cold fish in person, same reason I steered clear of Carson bio.

can’t wait to watch John Wayne and ray milland battle a giant octopus in hd pic.twitter.com/eM5jCXCjmy

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) August 7, 2019

that makeup is touching

Wait Steve Martin and Lionel Barrymore are in that too?

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/usc-john-wayne-exhibit-removal-protests-1027317/

Joseph McBride, author of SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD, posted this on Facebook:

"USC's 'School of Cinematic Arts' dishonors itself and its name by taking down its exhibit about the school's greatest filmmaking alumnus. Wayne doesn't need their tribute. They fail to separate the actor from the flawed man who played so many indelible roles onscreen. Who among us is without character flaws? Let him or her cast the first stone. I interviewed Navajos in Monument Valley about the 1971 Playboy interview two years later, and they said they were disappointed because they always got along well with Wayne and thought he was their friend. All but one of those I spoke with then were more disappointed and philosophical about him than angry, although one young Navajo who had just returned from Vietnam and was wearing his Army flak jacket told me if Wayne ever returned to Monument Valley to make a film, 'He'd better watch out, because I'll be sitting up there in those rocks with my M-1 rifle and I'll pick him off.' I thought what a story that would be: 'INDIAN KILLS JOHN WAYNE.' Until Wayne died I had to wrestle with what I do would do if I heard he was going back there and whether I would warn him or let history happen. But I can appreciate the films of my favorite actor while still deploring and regretting his political stands. I just watched him again tonight in one of John Ford's masterpieces, THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. And the other night I saw Wayne in Ford's FORT APACHE, in which he plays the Army officer who is friendly with the Apaches and honors Cochise, while trying to make peace with him and his people. I wonder if anyone at USC has bothered to watch that great film."

No

Sign of the times ∞ + 1: TCM has cancelled the John Wayne Summer Under the Stars day scheduled for 8/22. They will instead show a Natalie Wood program.

Big leggy.

Very consistent, while TCM keeps programming films featuring actual Klansmen.

lol, Charles Coburn films tonight! look him up

Wait until they find out about Stumpy

not seeing any news about TCM cancellation

but i trust j.lu has her sources

http://www.tcm.com/schedule/weekly.html?tz=PST&sdate=2020-08-22

TCM.com hasn't said anything, but the message board regulars noticed.

Moreover, The Searchers is in the prime 8pm slot.

Watching Rio Bravo again (fourth time?), I'm struck by John Wayne's beautiful serenity. He's always observing the other characters, as an actor and as Chance. He's relaxed but wary. His best performance.

yes! a very thoughtful performance in a fairly rambunctious movie

I got into a dispute with a friend in the neighborhood yesterday when he told me that he never watches “those kind of Westerns,” because John Wayne was “a cartoon” and “not cool like Clint.”

I finally remembered that he had actually gone to film school but seemed to be one of those Film Bros we have talked about.

But not after I had already started to go full-on Ethan Edwards on him, saying “Maybe not according to what you believe, but according to what that Comanche believes!”

I misquoted it slightly. Time for another rewatch soon I guess.