A Girl and a Gun: El Duque

May 09, 2005

El Duque

My thoughts about Errol Flynn (April 22) sent my mind in the direction of action-hero stars of some magnitude, and you don't get very far on a trek like that without running up against The Big Guy. Broadly speaking, my views on John Wayne are not unlike those about Flynn: he made something like 175 films (including the early silents in which he was essentially an extra), of which I find no more than a dozen watchable. But in those twelve, where there was a highly fortunate and rare matchup of script, direction, and a commitment of interest by Wayne, he's as good as any action hero gets and better than many male leads of any sort. He embodied his character outside and in, which is about as much as you can ask of an actor. Some of those pictures taken as a whole I regard as utter dogs, sentimentalized beyond repair, but Wayne's work is still compelling for all the hogwash that surrounds him.

He made his bones in westerns, and for me they were the only genre in which he was completely credible (with one exception, noted below). War films, cop films, sea-faring films, treasure-hunting adventure films, Cold War films, African big game films--no in italics. He never looked comfortable, he needed the wide open spaces and the unspoken code that a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, a dictum of which he convinced audiences when given the chance. His acquired drawl (he was born in Iowa and grew up in Glendale, California, attending the same high school I suffered through thirty years later) from endless B and sub-B westerns in the thirties became his natural voice, and it only worked on the plains.

Wayne's ace in the hole was his ability to suggest a devastating internal force that he was rigorously containing for the common good. He could obliterate enemies, without doubt, but he was slightly reluctant to use that power unless absolutely necessary. This gave him a moral stature that dovetailed with his imposing physical presence. It's no wonder that his breakout role was as Johnny Ringo in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Ringo leaves little doubt of his capacity for violence in that first shot of him hailing the coach in the road. But he doesn't use it, doesn't raise a hand or fire a shot until the danger is urgent, then protects the coach from Indians and pursues the objects of his vengeance in Lordsburg with reluctance, in part because it separates him--and might do so permanently--from his woman. But a man's gotta do . . . By the way, the indispensable study by Garry Wills, John Wayne's America, argues that by rights Wayne should have achieved stardom in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930), a film released when Wayne was twenty-three and which I have not seen.

This power of containment was largely sustained through the John Ford cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), although in the latter we see a hard-driving and uncompromising Wayne character who turns out to have an extremely thoughtful and innovate plan for dealing with the Indians. Along the way, an interesting development took place in Wayne's career, now at something close to its apex. In Red River (1948), Howard Hawks cast him as, for the most part, an older man, someone in his late fifties or early sixties when Wayne himself had just turned forty. It was a great insight that the action hero could also play an authority figure, even one who abused his authority, and Wayne was brilliant in the part, also making co-lead Montgomery Clift--supposedly a "real" actor--look badly out of place. (One of the stunt managers on the scene, who had grown up in the rural west, was given the thankless task of making Clift "act western," but eventually threw up his hands, saying that when you said "west," Clift thought "Central Park West.") Wayne's Tom Dunson was a harsh product of his environment, with all the appearances of hair-trigger judgment and an unforgiving temperament. Yet he never lets us doubt his affection for Matt, the Clift character, and the ending--soppy as it is--makes a kind of sense. Wayne ordinarily didn't reach for this sort of complexity, but playing the older man with some of the physical presence of the younger seems to have given him a certain freedom.

The older man returned in some later roles, but none more memorably than The Searchers (1956), his greatest and Ford's greatest film. It's a movie well before its time when it comes to depicting the underside of the old west, the racism as well as the courage and heroism, the unchecked violence and lack of apology for it. Ford cannot entirely stay away from kitschiness, like a lush who has gone on the wagon but finds he cannot resist the lure of a bottle he finds, but these elements are largely confined to a later segment of the film. The early scene in which Wayne's Ethan Edwards and his brother's wife, Martha, played by Dorothy Jordan, wordlessly reveal to us their long and enduring love for one another, is a masterpiece of acting and directorial restraint, much assisted by Ward Bond's little piece of finding something else to look at. Wayne reveals emotional depth in that brief moment which one can never separate from his often throughly unlikeable character, an unusual instance of redemption taking place at the outset and standing up (just) through much that is unforgiveable. Ethan ages in the course of the film, in some ways becoming more rigid, more apparently set upon eradicating the stain upon his family that his niece kidnapped by the Comanches represents, yet it's hard to believe that he could ever harm the daughter of Martha, his only but still significant vulnerable spot. At the famous ending, he delivers niece Debbie back to where she grew up, but when all the others go into the house, we see him on the porch, from inside, and he turns away without entering. It is often remarked that he no longer fits into the frontier he has helped build, but it is also true that he has provided the healing of a great breach, overcome his own prejudices, let love assert itself, and accepted the passing of his time with grace, not bitterness.

The one non-western in which Wayne seemed to manage was a film in which, tellingly, he played an outsider. I can't stand The Quiet Man (1952), almost a caricature of Ford's most nauseating sentimentalism trading in Irish characters who seem to come straight out of vaudeville, most especially Barry Fitzgerald's thirsty priest. But Wayne is believable, a little baffled by the mentalities and mores of these people, trying to come to peace with himself, and given minimally decent support by Maureen O'Hara and Victor McLaglen.

Once The Searchers was behind him, Wayne seemed to lapse into taking the easy way out, but also he may have been feeling his age (though he was only in his early fifties). In the hilariously ridiculous Rio Bravo (1959), a Hawks frontier comedy, he walks--and on one or two occasions runs--like a man in his late sixties, stiff-legged and wobbly. (Perhaps it was all those years on horses, which he hated with a passion; remember, he made more than sixty westerns between The Big Trail and Stagecoach, that is nine years, playing such memorable parts as Singin' Sandy Saunders [and he did sing] and Stoney Brooke.) There were some nice comic moments in North to Alaska (1960), especially the fight scenes, and Wayne even did a nice ironic turn in The Comancheros (1961), although to watch it you have to sit through 107 minutes of Stuart Whitman, which is more than can be decently asked of anyone. I know that ardent admirers of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) are thick on the ground, but I thought it was a piece of hack work all around, an opinion stoutly reinforced by a recent viewing. Strain as I might, I can't see anything there worth watching. The even later stuff--The Sons of Katie Elder, McClintock, El Dorado, The War Wagon, Rio Lobo, The War Wagon, Chisum, Big Jake, running from 1965 to 1971, with others still to follow--were essentially bait for ticket buyers, Wayne in a western and nothing more, absolutely formula stuff with hardly a care to shape, pace, credibility. In the midst of them all, True Grit (1969) won him his only Oscar, basically for doing a comic take-off on his screen image from the previous thirty years.

It seems to me that those blue-state voters who cannot understand the appeal of George W. Bush have failed to look at popular culture over the last fifty years or so. Wayne was for more than half that time the biggest or one of the biggest box office draws even after he stopped making pictures in 1976, and eventually his place was taken by Clint Eastwood in his cop/western phase: these were strong, silent, unschooled men who were unafraid to resort to violence if necessary, men who were suspicious of people from cities with fancy educations but also had a personal moral compass firmly in place, one on which right and wrong were clearly dilineated. Just as Eastwood to some extent outgrew that work, in Bird, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, and Mystic River, Wayne stretched its limits in his best Ford films and Red River. I can watch much of that work over and over--my children have vowed never to forgive me for organizing their informal education some thirty years ago around repeated viewings of and windy little lectures about The Searchers--and never fail to find richness; that's a small vein in a big mine, but it's there.

May 09, 2005 at 11:27 AM | Permalink

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A Girl and a Gun

May 09, 2005

El Duque

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