Author: Mark Tiedemann

I had to go to Wal-Mart this past weekend.  I know, I know, big box store, destructive of small town America, yadda-yadda.  I hate them, but once a year we do a Wal-Mart run for all kinds of stuff that, frankly, just ain’t as cheap anywhere else—toilet paper, vitamins, tissue paper, day-to-day Stuff.

Usually I go with Donna.  This time she was in Iowa and I did it solo.

Since I was there anyway, I browsed the big stack of remainder DVDs they always have and I went a little bonkers.  I bought the first season of the original Robin Hood with Richard Greene.  I remember the show as a kid and loved it, so for $5.00, why not?  (A real stitch, too, to see all these young actors who later did so much better—a skinny Leo McKern was a real hoot!)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Shane, The Mask of Zorro… I’m filling gaps sort of.  But I came home and immediately watched Rio Bravo.  You know, the movie got made over at least twice, maybe three times.  The best remake was El Dorado, but the original has something about it that the rest lack.  I loved the soundtrack, the overamplified gunshots, the seriously deficient acting of Rickie Nelson.  It’s a real jumbled mess, you know.  Dean Martin’s performance was the best thing in the film and it’s actually really damn good.  Wayne was, well, John Wayne.

There are two John Wayne movies from back then that I think showcased what the man could actually do.  I think he was such an icon that he really couldn’t be seen as anything else, so some of his performances were seriously underappreciated.  Anyone who thinks the man couldn’t act hasn’t seen The Searchers, which is a very disturbing movie and Wayne played a very disturbed character.  The other one was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Wayne isn’t the main character.  Not quite a supporting role, but definitely part of an ensemble, and it really is a rather convincing, sometimes moving performance.  It’s very much about the waining (pardon the pun) of the macho guy of the West.  His character is tough, independent, building his life competently, laying plans, and being, in the larger scheme of things, a Good Man.  But he loses it all to the educated Easterner who shows up in the guise of Jimmy Stewart carrying a stack of law books.  Both men get a lesson in realities, but where the lesson destroys one, it makes the other, and it is anything but a simple formula western.

(I suppose you could throw Red River in there as well, but then we could go down the list of great Wayne westerns that were just…well, pretty fine, actually.)
Rio Bravo, though, is the pure stuff of early western myth.  It’s formula to the core, but Howard Hawks made it work like a well-tuned V-8.  The photography was terrific and this DVD had restored Technicolor print.  When Technicolor was good it was the best.  There were times, though, when it didn’t work very well, but that was the cinematographers’ fault.  Here it works.

One thing, though—Angie Dickinson.  She got better, but she really wasn’t a very good actress.  Nice to look at though, and she actually held her own against Wayne, but…well, she got better.

Wayne became a target in the Sixties and Seventies for people who were intolerant of any kind of unapologetic patriotism, and he did overdo the flagwaving.  It’s a shame, but it was a war of symbols.  When you talk to people who knew him, the public image was somewhat at odds with the man himself.  I spoke once with George Takei about him.  Takei was in The Green Berets with Wayne and, despite their differences politically, he had nothing but nice things to say about Wayne, who labeled him Captain Sulu from day one.  Takei said the rule on the set was No Politics.  It was a smooth, cordial set, and Wayne was responsible for keeping the latent heat at a manageable level, an impressive feat given the subject of the film and time it was being made.

Wayne avoided military service in WWII because he had a family.  I don’t know exactly how that worked—lots of men with families went—but he somehow made the argument that his presence in films would be more beneficial than his presence on a battlefield.  Depending on how you look at it, he was right.  It raises the question of how authentic one needs to be to espouse patriotic feeling.  Did Waynes later flagwaving require that he make the ultimate sacrifice, or could he be a patriot without needing to wear a uniform?  He put on a television special in the late Sixties about America.  It was a bombastic jeremiad about how wonderful the country is.  He did, however, get a lot of interesting people on it, like Robert Culp, who was very much an anti-war protestor at the time.  Thinking back on it now, I realize that at no point in it did he advocate going to Vietnam.  He never said that to be a Good American one had to put on a uniform and pick up a gun.  He just pushed the idea that the country was worth loving.

His last film, The Shootist, was a sad one.  He went out in a blaze of gunfire, taking out a number of old enemies in one last shoot-out.  It can be read as an unapologetic, last hurrah for the way of the gun.  But it was also an admission that times had changed and he was dying, and the fitting end to his life would be to die as he lived.  A little over the top, that, but in its way bravely tragic.  After seeing it, one could go back over a long body of work to see elements of that tragic admission that this was all over.  And probably just as well.  Nathan rescued Lucy from the Indians, brought her home, and then had to leave.  He didn’t belong anymore.

Wayne was one of the first and for a long time the only Big Name Star who allowed himself to be killed on screen.  I don’t know if that was his idea or if he just accepted it as a necessary part of good storytelling.  But there are many Wayne movies wherein the “hero” must leave, because the violence necessary to resolve the conflict makes him unsuitable for the world he has just made safe.  I think that gets overlooked a lot.  Too much.