John Wayne, with Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, in Howard Hawks's "Rio Bravo" (1959)The New York Times
Published: May 20, 2007
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.
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