{"id":5412,"date":"2006-10-02T09:13:43","date_gmt":"2006-10-02T13:13:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5412"},"modified":"2022-10-11T21:55:34","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T01:55:34","slug":"john-wayne-and-john-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5412","title":{"rendered":"John Wayne and John Ford"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow – a great piece by Stanley Crouch about these two often unfairly maligned (now) artists.<\/a><\/p>\n

(It made me laugh out loud that Shirley Temple was described as “monstrous and adolescent”. hahahahaha – can’t stop laughing)<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts pulled out:<\/p>\n

On Ford:<\/p>\n

No director has ever dealt more insightfully with the offhanded, snide, and potentially suicidal aspects of bigotry than Ford. This sets him above almost all other directors because he could understand and make art of the tragedies that attended bigotry, one of the most pernicious forms of superstition. Beyond that, Ford recognizes how community acts as a protection against the inevitable meaninglessness of human life, which is no more than anarchic energy unless put in a story of some sort.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wow – so many people who sneer at John Ford now miss that. They really do.<\/p>\n

And then he makes a very specific observation about John Wayne in The Searchers<\/i>(see below). An aside: I love it when people don’t just blow off acting as a by-product of other more IMPORTANT art – like set direction, or scripts, or whatever. I love it when reviewers – and Ebert does this sometimes, although not enough in my opinion – actually make detailed observations about what an actor is doing<\/i>. Many people have contempt for actors, or they do not understand the actor’s work. That comes across in reviews where the film is disucssed in detail, and then at the very end we get a paragraph like this:<\/p>\n

So and so is convincing as Mary Shmary, Blahdee blah overcompensates in his role as the preacher, and Hoo-hah is merely adequate in his important part.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hey, thanks for your insights. But WHY? I love it when they get into WHY. Films are a collaborative art – and the whole thing must be judged – yes – but I love it when a reviewer actually knows how to analyze WHY a moment is good, or WHY a moment does not work. Gives me goosebumps.<\/p>\n

But anyway, here’s Stanley Crouch on a moment John Wayne has in The Searchers<\/i>:<\/p>\n

When Wayne, as Ethan, comes upon the black smoke and the orange flame of the burning house left by the Comanches, his face is one of absolute terror, panic, and rage. At the top of a hill, Wayne flings out his right arm to free his rifle from the long, colorful buckskin sleeve in which it has been sheathed. The force of that flung arm is one of the most explosive gestures in all of cinema, and also among the most impotent: No one down there is alive, and Ethan knows it. He is, at that moment, like the man in Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death<\/i> who so impressed Hemingway because his choice was to draw a sword when faced with the irreversible horror of encroaching doom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

John Wayne said once<\/a> that one of the things he learned early on – from doing a play in high school – is that “If you’re going to make a gesture – make it<\/i>.”<\/p>\n

Isn’t that beautiful? Whatever it is. Leaping up on a horse, kissing the girl, punching your son, or flinging your arm out to free your rifle.<\/p>\n

It’s a gesture. Don’t pretend<\/i> to make the gesture. Don’t sketch in the outlines<\/i> of the gesture. Don’t intellectualize<\/i> the gesture.<\/p>\n

Make it<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Good advice for life too, huh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wow – a great piece by Stanley Crouch about these two often unfairly maligned (now) artists. (It made me laugh out loud that Shirley Temple was described as “monstrous and adolescent”. hahahahaha – can’t stop laughing) Read the whole thing, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[274,114,1325],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5412"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5412"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179686,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5412\/revisions\/179686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}