John Wayne at 100

Long before his death in 1979 John Wayne had become an
icon of American masculinity.  His image was hardened
by right wing utterances that ran the gamut from the
merely conservative to the decidedly reactionary (in
an infamous “Playboy” interview he argued that
‘blacks’ should be denied the vote until they could be
‘educated to the point of political responsibility’).
In his later roles he usually played the stern
patriarch, ever ready to instruct  youngsters in what
it is to be a red blooded patriot.

Whatever the excesses of embarrassments like “The
Green Berets”, Wayne’s 1968 apology for the Vietnam
War, or his off-screen activities during the McCarthy
era (which found on-screen expression in the notorious
“Big Jim McLain”, with Duke playing an officer of the
House of UnAmerican Activities Committee), the man’s
life and career choices were never as straightforward
as they appeared.   Fifty years of involvement in
movie making - half of that time, from the late 1940s
until the early 1970s, as  the most popular star in
the world - cannot be explained in terms of Republican
ideology alone.

Wayne was a mass of contradictions.  An actor adept at
portraying men of action, who segued seemlessly from
westerns to combat movies, he didn’t exactly bend over
backwards to serve his country during World War II.
In fact, whilst the likes of Clark Gable and Jimmy
Stewart put their careers on hold to fly bombing
mission over Germany, Wayne fought history’s greatest
battles exclusively on the silver screen.  His later
complaints about ‘draft dodgers’ during the
1960s had more than a faint wiff of hypocrisy about
them.

Thought of as the ideal ‘WASP’ leading man (’White,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant’) Wayne’s romantic preferences
were decidedly of a Latino persuasion and he formally
converted to Catholicism on his deathbed.  All his
three wives were of South American extraction and he
had a great love of Mexico and Mexicans.  Yet his most
personal film project - the only one he entirely
directed himself - was “The Alamo”, a celebration of
Texan defiance of Mexico in which many see a racist
subtext.

As the very definition of the screen cowboy Wayne
fought and killed a whole lot of indians.  He played a
part in the genre’s appalling misrepresentation of
Native Americans and in interviews shed no tears about
historical genocide.  Even so, in his best work a far
more complex story is told.  In “Hondo”, a film
produced by his own production company, Wayne plays a
part indian who clearly respects their culture and
regrets its passing.  In his mentor John Ford’s
‘cavalry trilogy’ Wayne’s characters are at pains to
avoid unnecessary conflict with a people whom he
clearly sees as being wronged and unjustly treated.

Wayne delivered his finest performance in Ford’s “The
Searchers”, as Ethan Edwards, a hard bitten racist
whose quest to retrieve his captive niece from
renegade indians is less one of liberation than
assasination: because she had been sexually sullied,
‘living with a buck’ as he puts, she must be killed.
Whilst in the film’s climax Edwards has a change of
heart, there is no mistaking his raw hatred or the
degree to which his feelings alienate him from both
the indian and settler worlds.  The closing image,
amongst the most famous in cinema history, of a door
closing on his iconically posed figure (Wayne
purposely borrowed a gesture from Harry Carrey, one of
the western’s earliest stars), has a terrible
poignancy to it.

“The Searchers” implicitly critiques all of Wayne’s
more one-dimensional action roles, demonstrating the
utmost artistry in both acting and thematic
understanding of the genre for which he was the
principal symbol.  Wayne marked its personal
significance to him by calling one of his sons Ethan.

In a career that spanned over 160 films there were
many other great performances.  He won an Oscar in
1969 for “True Grit”, an award that is usually thought
of as a token one, yet the part of the drunken sherrif
Rooster Cogburn demonstrated Duke’s underrated comic
flair.  His range was always greater than his critics
allowed, encompassing the callow youths of “The Big
Trail” and “Stagecoach”, the credible Swede in “The
Long Voyage Home”, the aged rancher in “Red River”,
the embittered drill sergeant in “Sands of Iwo Jima”,
and others too countless to mention.

He had his limits, of course.  The part of the Roman
centurion tending to Jesus Christ with the immortal
line ‘truly this man is the son of Gawd’ in “The
Greatest Story Ever Told”, was beyond him.  And trying
to play Genghis Kahn in “The Conqueror” was a mistake
that literally killed him.  The saddest irony of John
Wayne’s life was that for all his hawkish support of
American foreign policy it was exposure to a nuclear
test site on location that gave the Duke cancer.