What’s your favorite John Wayne film? But more than the title – could you talk about why?
A lot of people have very personal responses to John Wayne – it’s like he reminds them of something else – and this, to me, is the mark of those great movie stars of the studio system years. They got INTO us in a way that modern movie stars do not.
And … any specific favorite John Wayne MOMENT that you have … what moment of his, in terms of acting, is emblazoned in your brain? A glance, the way he said a line, anything … Describe it.
Let’s discuss his acting. It’s so good, and I can tell, from all of these comments (which have greatly moved me, by the way) – how passionately you all feel about him, how much his work means to you.
So.
John Wayne films and moments: GO!!
End of the day … gah!
The Green Berets. I’m an Army guy. It appeals to me in that respect. It’s was very topical and less propaganda-ish than his other war movies. But he captures the essence of special operations forces.
The song always brings a tear to my eye. I recounted the story of the former SOF soldier/civilian on Okinawa who died while I was there. This movie always takes me back to that moment and only makes it more poignant.
Not quite on topic, but I’ve always remembered an interview done with Ron Howard and he talked about filming “The Shootist” and how he ran into The Duke at an awards show sometime later. Duke was very close to the end, but he came up to Ron and told him, hey kid, I have this great script for you and me… and very shortly after he died. I remember how RH described his deep respect for Duke and how he admired him for being so optomistic when so close to the end. Speaks volumes about the man.
“Fill your hands you SONOFABITCH!”
Nothin better than Rooster. He was the all American Hero. Drunk, blind and bumbling. He got the job done and I loved the way he protected what was rightfuly his. And rightfully someone elses.
Then there’s “Rooster Cogburn” with Hepburn. I mean, c’mon.
“I look at ya…with your bear-like paws, and your big belly, and I have to say it: You’re a credit to the whole male sex and I’m proud to have ya for my FRIEND!”
Clippety-clop clippety-clop
Then there’s The Cowboys. He’s restarined and lovely in the movie. He is what a movie star with a gun should be: refreshing, sweet, tough, and wise.
Love me some John Wayne.
Gotta go with the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It’s just a great flick, and easily my favorite John Wayne performance. I enjoy the way he regards Stewart’s Stoddard with both bemusement and irritation….
LOVE Liberty Valance.
When Stewart’s tripped in the restaurant, and Wayne sneaks up from off camera holding the two pistols in his hands. Amazing. It’s such a great entrance for him. And no one does it better.
Great, great film. Briliant performance.
This is just off the top of my head. I saw True Grit the other night. Glen Campbell is horrible in it, and it is not my favorite Wayne film, but there are many great scenes in it. There is a particular one with Wayne and Kim Darby that sticks with me. They are waiting for Ned Pepper(Robert Duvall) and his gang to show up at a cabin alongside a stream. It is nighttime, and Wayne starts to tell Darby about his life, escapades, and former wife and son. He tells her about his wife leaving him for her first husband, and how clumsy his son was–“He musta broke 40 cup. A clumsier child I never did see”–or something to that effect. It is a real and true moment that reveals a lot about the character of Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn. My description does it no justice, but, watch it, and you will see what I mean.
My two favorite Wayne films are The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. There is some silliness in the former that keeps it from being a perfect movie, but it is a fine example of the art of film-making. A lot of that has to do with John Ford, but Wayne’s portrayal of Ethan Edwards is the core of the movie. The final scene, with Wayne left outside as the family celebrates inside the house, is iconic.(Boy, I sound like a bad reviewer) In Liberty Valance, Wayne plays a western hero, who cedes that role, and the woman he loves, to Jimmy Stewart. He keeps his secrets, although it costs him bitterly. Jimmy Stewart, and what he represents, is perfect in his part, but it is almost impossible to think of any other actor whose persona could embody everything Wayne, and his character, mean to the movie. He’s a simple man, but he’s smart enough to recognize what Stewart offers Vera Miles, the town, and eventually the state. He’s no patsy, but he doesn’t fight the reality he sees before him. In short, he is a man–he gets drunk, and emotionally burns down his house, but, in the end, he does the right thing to the detriment of his own dreams. Isn’t that what almost all Wayne characters do? They have a well-defined set of principles with a few grey areas, and they insist that they and others around them abide by those principles.
I was really taken with the quote you posted about reaction shots. I never realized how true that is. I think of Wayne as an action hero, but there are so many more scenes of his reaction to action than I ever recognized. Another thing that I think is important about John Wayne is that he was the real thing. Many of the characteristics we see on the screen, are inherent to Wayne himself. That lends a substance and validity to the movie star creation that is lacking in a lot of other stars who don’t have such qualities in their real lives. Jack Nicholson and Jimmy Stewart come to mind as other actors who have some of the personal qualities they often portray on screen.
Well, that was a long ramble that didn’t really answer your request, or get any closer to the subject—but I enjoyed the exercise.
“The Searchers,” for reasons that are difficult to articulate. The majesty of the film-making, and the obsessive nature of the quest lend the film an epic quality that resonates with me whenever I watch it. And the moment when Wayne takes Natalie Wood into his arms at the end, when his feelings toward her are not at all clear, is for me “The Wayne Moment.”
My husband is the John Wayne fan around our house, but I’ll have to say Fort Apache is my favorite because hello? Shirley Temple! She also has the best movie name ever, in that movie, Philadelphia Thursday.
Danny’s favorite: The Cowboys. He watches it every time he catches it on TV. It is his Bring It On, I guess.
(Trivia: In The Cowboys, Cimmaron was played by a young A Martinez, who went on the star as Cruz Castillo in the best soap opera ever shown on TV, Santa Barbara.)
True Grit, The Shootist, The Searchers, The Cowboys, Big Jake, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are probably his best Westerns.
The Cowboys is my favorite for the “personal response” pick but no so much because of Wayne’s performance.
When I saw it I was an adolescent myself and I could relate to the boys in the movie. A couple of things stick in my mind.
The first thing that stuck with me was Bruce Dern’s role as the villain. He scared the crap out of me and now it is hard to think of someone who has done a better job at being a vicious bastard than Dern did in that movie.
The second was the scene where the boys catch up with Dern’s character. He is hung up in his stirrup and the boys just calmly stare at him, and spook his horse. Talk about cold, righteous vengeance.
Otherwise I think his best performance was his last in The Shootist.
His best “fun” movies were Hatari and Donovan’s Reef. Love those movies.
His classic movie in my book is of course The Quiet Man.
Finally, I seem to remember reading somewhere that the modern action movie would not be what it is without John Wayne. As I recall he is credited with revolutionizing fight scenes and using stuntmen.
Oh, come on people, it’s Rio Bravo!! I saw Rio Lobo at a matinee when I was 8… I came back and described it to my dad. He said it sounded like the final scene was a lot like Rio Bravo…
A couple of years later, I saw Rio Bravo on TV… Wow, was it SO much better than the later movie. Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan at their best and introducing Angie “frickin'” Dickinson in her first major role (As hot as any of te Hitchcock girls)!
Is it a classic by film critics standards, like Stagecoach? Of course not, but it’s a great movie that I never let pass by, if I “flip” to it (Much like Bring It On which,BTW, I watched with the kids Sunday on USA… my 3 year-old daughter now wants to be a cheerleader)
I like the Duke the most in that role where he reminded me of America…
OK, Rio Bravo, during that impromptu Dean Martin/Ricky Nelson concert in the middle of the film. The camera pans up to the Duke and he’s wearing this false grin that seems to say, “You fellas sure can sing, but now this picture’s 30 minutes longer than it needs to be!”
My second favorite was not on film. There’s a tape floating out there called Celebrities…At Their Worst! In it, a drunken Duke speaks to an ROTC group, I believe about campus hippies: “At USC we would’ve kicked their ass!” That’s a close second.
Also good, from the Shootist:
I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.
But all else pales in comparison to that bemused grin in Rio Bravo.
My 2 favorite Duke movies are Rio Bravo and El Dorado. They aren’t good movies per se, but they are amuzing on many levels.
El Dorado is funny in that James Caan is just so serious, and the soundtrack comes straight from the old TV Series Batman. Even with all of this it manages to be a fair western.
Rio Bravo which is basically the same story as El Dorado, has Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin as 2 generations of gun slingers (and heart-throbs). Also manages to be both funny and a good western. A very young Angie Dickenson plays the love interest… she is miscast I think.
Neither is the Duke’s greatest work and both are a bit silly, but they manage to be very entertaining films.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. A great Western all about friendship, respect and duty. The Duke doesn’t get the girl, doesn’t get anything really. But when he calls to Pompey for his rifle and plugs Lee Marvin…well that to me is John Wayne right there.
The Sands of Iwo Jima defines The Duke as the uber United States freakin’ Marine too. I saw it again for the 100th time on AMC last weekend. John Wayne always did this thing where at least once in every film all the tension goes out of his face and makes him look like a big softie.
The scene where he goes home with a B girlonly to find her baby hidden away in it’s crib. He goes all soft and leaves his money clip full of cash with the baby and walks out.
He’s the man.
The Searchers & Angel & the Badman.
Plus the Duke and all his movies with the first “Big Red(Ohara).”
Can’t forget Red River and the Horse Soldiers.
True Grit. For all the reasons mentioned above. Favorite line: “Well, come on up and see an old fat man sometime!” as he prepares to gallop away and jump the 4-post fence.
I always thought that the Duke is better as an icon than as an actual actor.
As an actor, John Wayne delivered his lines in a distracting cardboard monotone, and (much like William Shatner) he always seemed to be playing his role as a parody of himself. One of the most unintentionally funny moments in cinematic history is the Duke playing the Roman Centurion in The Greatest Story Ever Told. “Surely he is the Son of God.” (too bad my impression doesn’t come across as written text, but, believe me, it’s pretty good.)
A hugh part of the Duke’s appeal is that he is so unapologetically masculine. I think that he is so admired because he was the last of his breed. He began his career in the early 30’s and came up with the likes of Gary Cooper and William Holden. He ended his career in ’76, when mainstream movies tended more toward Woody Allen than Yul Brenner.
The universe that John Wayne’s characters inhabited was black v. white, right v. wrong, and good v. evil. There was little emotional complexity. A man, after all, had to do what a man had to do. (that was Cooper, but the principle applies). After Wayne, we got the tortured antiheroes of Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Steve McQueen. Thereafter, any hero that didn’t brood was pretty much relegated to B-list action movies.
I wonder whether this shift in movie characters had to do with the rise of feminism and the shifts in traditional gender roles. It wasn’t quite so taboo for men to be portrayed as not having an iron grip on their emotions. I don’t know–just a theory.
Watching the Duke is to remember a time when being a man wasn’t necessarily easy, but it wasn’t complicated.
Well, I think movies are not worse off for admitting some complexity in the world. And for admitting that men are complex, women are complex, yadda yadda. I think, though, that if you look at the screwball comedies of the 1930s they are COMPLETELY about role reversal, and messing with traditional gender roles. The befuddled man, the strong-headed woman who turns his life over – It wasn’t until the late 40s and 50s that there was such a clamp-down and suddenly we have Donna Reed (nothing against her, love her) and Doris Day as what women are “supposed” to be. But before that? We had Hepburn, and Stanwyck, and John Crawford, and Jean Arthur … we had Cary Grant and Gary Cooper (in Ball of Fire, one of my favorite movies) and all these traditional staunch leading men playing, basically, bumbling goofballs … So I’m not sure the rise of feminism had anything to do with it, since the screwballs pre-date those.
But back to Wayne – what I like is how he got an amazing range of emotions into that one character that he played – sometimes he played up the wry humor, sometimes he played up the crankiness, whatever … And it always seemed fresh somehow. He never descended into a parody of himself.
The battle between High Noon and Rio Bravo is an interesting example of the tension in the movies at that time – right before the studio system went bust. Wayne and Hawks lambasted High Noon as un-American and made Rio Bravo as an answer to it. Both are very good films. I happen to prefer High Noon, because I prefer complexity – but I think Wayne managed to get a huge amount of LIFE, in all its shades, into his major roles. Look at his character in The Searchers. Very complex there. Or Red River, too.
Yeah, the “rise of feminism” theory may be a load of crap. I’m not quite willing to give up on it yet, however.
You are, of course, right that early movies often drew comedic or dramatic content out of reversing traditional gender roles. But the reason that they could “make hay” out of reversing these roles is because those very roles existed to begin with. With the rise of feminism, these traditional gender roles began to blur. And the timing of this coincides with the increasing inner complexity of characters on the big screen. In this case, post hoc may not, in fact, ergo propter hoc, but I can’t help but to think that as men and women in real life became less certain about the “proper” way to act, movie characters also became less black and white. Movie writers could no longer manufacturer a plot simply by turning the tables on gender roles.
Of course, there were cultural changes occurring at the time other than feminism. The 60’s and 70’s were a tad bit tumultuous. There was the civil rights movement, Watergate, Vietnam and all those other things that Billy Joel mentions. But I think that it was feminism and the sexual revolution that fundamentally altered the way that people interacted with each other. The old codes of conduct, which had been around for decades if not centuries, suddenly ceased to apply. As a society, we no longer knew what to do with our hands. I was just a kid then, but I think that had to be an awfully confusing time.
John Wayne cut through the confusion. His movies ignored the sea changes in society and he was one of the last movie stars to do business the old way. It is somewhat telling that everybody lists Wayne’s period pieces as their favorites–the westerns and war movies. Nobody mentions Brannigan or McQ. Perhaps the Duke is less appealing in movies that are not set in a less socially complicated time.
All of this is to say that, to the extent that we use stories to teach us how to act in our own lives, John Wayne set an unambiguous example for people in an ambiguous time. I suspect that this, more so than his acting ability (which I still contend is overrated) is the reason for his enduring popularity. I simply can’t imagine John Wayne being successful as a movie star today.
As I said, this theory could be a load of crap. And I sincerely hope that it doesn’t sound like I’m blaming feminism for ruining the movies. It didn’t.
If you don’t like this theory, here’s another to consider: John Wayne was one of the last A-list movie stars who wasn’t a “Method Actor”.
Yeah, that theory could be crap too
Goose –
hahaha Actually, I like your theories a lot – they’re quite interesting and I think there is probably something to them.
Ambiguous times DO call for more ambiguous heroes – also, in the 50s come the rise of “adolescence” as a real thing to be reckoned with – juvenile delinquents, etc. – This was probably the beginning of the anti-hero. The brooding adolescent, angry at authority figures – etc. i didn’t grow up in the 1950s – so I have no idea how stifling it was for some people – I can only take their word for it. People like James Dean – and his rebellion – may seem rather quaint today – but obviously it struck a deep deep chord among the youth who didn’t want to fit into little square pegs being set up for them by … who?
The Beats had a lot to do with that sea-change as well … In a way, because society was so much more conformist then – it seems that the rebellion came out in SUCH an interesting way – Now we have artists putting poop on the Madonna and calling it art. haha I mean, whatever – I don’t get all up in arms about that stuff like some people do (but those people seem to be the types who enjoy blowing a gasket on a daily basis) – but I do think that when there is actually a status quo in society, when a culture has some rigidity – the rebellious art that comes out of it is SO fascinating, SO good.
If that makes ANY SENSE.