Michael Sragow in today's Baltimor Sun has a column on John Wayne:
"In John Wayne's best-loved non-Western, John Ford's 1952 The Quiet Man, he plays a boxer afraid of his own strength because he once killed a man in the ring. He does one of the slowest burns in film history, expressing the splutter with a hitch in his rolling walk and the way he dispatches a butt like a spear to the ground as if to say he finally means business. And his reluctance to be violent makes him likable, even noble.
Look beneath the weathered surface and raucous high jinks of Wayne's trademark Westerns, and even the tortured complexities of Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) and Ford's The Searchers (1956), and you'll see that valiant manliness at the core.
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These films reveal that "The Duke" had the true star's instinct of delivering what his followers wanted before they even knew they wanted it.
For example, in the smash romantic comedy Without Reservations (1946),(see picture above) new to DVD on Tuesday, Wayne co-stars with It Happened One Night's Claudette Colbert. But Wayne is the one who carries the comedy, especially when espousing values that aren't 19th century - they're 17th century.
He sums up his stance in a remarkable speech that memorializes the pioneers:
"Do you think these pioneers filled out form number X6277 and sent in a report saying the Indians were a little unreasonable? Did they have insurance for their old age, for their crops, for their homes? They did not! They looked at the land, and the forest, and the rivers. They looked at their wives, their kids and their houses, and then they looked up at the sky and they said thanks, God, we'll take it from here."
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More than any of his peers, he retained a rabid fan base and an image forceful enough to bring Old Western style into modern settings and make viewers of all political stripes enjoy the incongruity. His unpretentious flamboyance evoked nostalgia for wide open spaces even in urban boys and girls.
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It took Hawks to toughen Wayne's image into the grizzled patriarch who could make taciturnity seem belligerent. His most famous role for Hawks was as the Captain Bligh of the cattle drive in Red River (1948). When Ford saw what Hawks could do with Wayne, he gave him even meatier parts, especially in Rio Grande (1950). Co-star Maureen O'Hara, embodied just the kind of woman the Wayne hero would set his cap for: fiery, beautiful, independent, not standing for any guff. Few evocations of tormented love equal the scene when the regimental chorus serenades Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke (Wayne) and his estranged wife, Kathleen (O'Hara). As the couple listens to "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen," longing and sadness, sweetness and hurt play through their faces.
My favorite Hawks-Wayne collaboration is that giddy oater, Rio Bravo (1959). Wayne was so confident, so self-sufficient without seeming self-satisfied, that Hawks played the rest of the cast against him for laughs. Wayne could fall down a flight of stairs and knock himself out and risk his neck on the reliability of a wheezing drunk (Dean Martin) and an old geezer (Walter Brennan) without ever losing his dignity. It had become a trick of nature that nothing could unhinge John Wayne.
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Wayne never lost the eagerness that was his first discernible trait. In his last film, The Shootist, he used it to weld together everything he knew. The film was set up, distastefully, as a premature obituary, with Wayne playing a gunslinger who knew he was dying of cancer. But Wayne knew exactly what he was doing - he was playing an outsized character, a myth, himself. And he lived up to it. Wayne didn't truckle to our sentiments.
It was inevitable that Wayne should end his career with a Western. Wayne helped invest the form with his own brawling good nature - and in films like Red River and The Searchers, wrestled with its dark side. He created a cowboy legacy that every other Western star or filmmaker would have to grapple with. Even today, you can hear them lining up and saying, "Thanks, Duke - we'll take it from here."
(To read the entire column click on the title above for a link)
