John Wayne's America
Wills, Garry
Still America's All-Time Favorite Movie Star John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity Garry Wills Simon & Schuster 38o pages $26 REVIEWED BY John R. Dunlap At Ft. Lewis, Washington,...
...he then became, for two decades, the "middle-aged figure of authority...
...Wills notes how much the effect of Wayne's acting depended on "the melodic internals of his cadenced speech...
...He even leaps to Wayne's defense against the "snobbish" critics who neglected Big Jake (1971), a film that Wills rightly admires and that Wayne himself rescued from incompetent direction...
...Rooster and the other Wayne characters are all the braver against impossible odds because —like Wayne himself in the classy way he fought the cancer that finally killed him—they are flawed and troubled and vulnerable, yet resourceful amid a cultural resilience "menacing" only to those of a mind to lock up the American spirit in desiccated intellectual and political categories...
...When he gets into Big Ideas, the prose goes pasty with the certitudes of his superannuated leftism...
...When the girl in True Grit, Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), picks through the personal effects of her murdered father during an JOHN R. DUNLAP teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...moron...
...When Wayne charged—reins in his teeth, a blazing rifle and a six-shooter in his free hands—every GI in the theater jumped to his feet to cheer him on...
...But—as the Duke would say—let it go...
...When he gets down to details, though, he is crisp and lucid...
...in combat training, our drill sergeants had stressed teamwork with the tag line: "Don't pull a John Wayne...
...Which'll it be...
...I mean—heck, it's a big country...
...The clearing is about seventy yards across...
...But to ignore the magnificent face-down in True Grit is to miss the point, and Wills's own point in writing this book is muddled, the likely consequence of attempting to answer a stupidly framed question: "What kind of country accepts as its norm an old \ man whose principal screen activity was shooting other people, or punching them out...
...A throwaway line in the introduction ('Wayne had no interesting ideas in his private life") is belied later when Wills, absorbed in the voluptuous details of his own film commentary, concurs with a perceptive criticism Wayne himself articulated about the ending of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949...
...Suribachi and Wayne's character Sergeant Stryker, he forgets to say that, artistically, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) is almost as bad...
...In America, the "basic myth is that of the frontier," and John Wayne came to embody "the American Adam" and "mythic ideas about American exceptionalism — contact with nature, distrust of govemment, dignity achieved by performance, skepticism toward the claims of experts...
...At that time Wayne had no special appeal for me...
...Wayne recoils at the insult, draws up tall in the saddle, and bellows: "Fill your hand, you sonuvabitch...
...That did it for the audience...
...his commentary on The Green Berets (1968) is devastating, but mercifully short, and amid his preoccupation with the symbolic flag-raising on Mt...
...Among several great lines in the film is a muted question asked by Mattie and overlooked by Wills, a question to which John Wayne's best performances always gave due regard: "Who knows what's in a man's heart...
...In the military, moviegoing is akin to attending a baseball game: half the entertainment is in the audience...
...One wishes that Wills had recognized the contradictions in his own writing...
...I do not suppose he do so out of contempt for the tricky choreography of stunt-doubling and brief close-ups of Wayne apparently mounted on a mechanical horse while grimacing and popping away with his Winchester and Colt...
...Before the release of Red River in 1948, he had been the "callow young cowboy...
...Wayne's is "a mixed and terrifying image, full of the unresolved contradictions in our own ideal country...
...Then back in his smirking mode, Wills asks why Wayne should have "become obsessed with the old mission compound where Texans fought a Mexican army on Mexican territory...
...Two-tone drop on the "be": Which'll it be...
...11 Searchers (1956) or The Shootist (1976) after reading Wills's fine analyses...
...Hardly a scene gets by on the screen without instant commentary—approving whoops at good lines, catcalls at bad ones, monosyllabic debate over uncertain ones...
...Lewis, Washington, one evening in 1969, I went to the on-base theater to see the latest John Wayne movie, True Grit...
...The theater was packed with about Boo GIs, many of them recently back from Vietnam, still dressed in jungle fatigues and canvas-top boots...
...even if you're not a John Wayne fan, you'll love watching Stagecoach (1939) or The44 What shows through is a kind of grudging affection on Wills's part for Wayne...
...Well, you can't refute a sneer, so here's a counterquestion: What kind of country re-elects an IvyLeague Huey Long for President, tolerates an oppressive tax system, fosters cultural artifacts such as MTV and the Modern Language Association...
...Twirl-cocking his Winchester in one hand, Wayne delivers his summons: "I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned—or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience...
...The theater was hushed and expectant...
...Along with his graceful body movements (the famous Wayne walk and "the contrapposto lean of his hips"), the measured cadences gave his delivery an "air of control, of inevitability": "He'll do" in Red River (1948) or "That'll be the day" in The Searchers (1956) and Big lake (1971...
...Whatever the character of his question, Wills's answer is incomplete...
...His status as a legend seemed to me ambiguous...
...The camera pans from a height...
...My impression was of an agreeable has-been given to cameo roles in sprawling epics like The Longest Day and How the West Was Won—and, as a star, relegated to a series of second-rate flicks aptly dismissed by Wills as "Rio this and Rio that...
...Another two-tone drop on the last syllable...
...The release of True Grit in 1969 marked the beginning of his third and final stage, the "conscious anachronism...
...On one side, Pepper (Robert Duvall) and his cutthroat henchmen rein in and lean on their saddlehorns with contemptuous sangfroid...
...We are eventuThe American Spectator • July 1997 69 ally given to know that the popularity of John Wayne (he was ranked the number-one favorite movie star in a poll taken in 1995, sixteen years after his death) is based on American cultural assumptions created, ironically, by the forebears of modem intellectuals inclined to despise Wayne: Jefferson, Bancroft, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Twain...
...Marshal Rooster Cog-burn (a 61-year-old pot-bellied Wayne with eyepatch and determined scowl shadowed under his Stetson) rides into a clearing to face down Lucky Ned Pepper and the remnants of Pepper's gang...
...To the summons, Ned Pepper shouts across the clearing: "I call that bold / talk for a one-eyed fat-man...
...Belatedly at age 24, I'd become a John Wayne fan...
...t seems odd that Wills ignores the climactic face-down in his discussion of True Grit...
...Wills takes no issue with technically similar composites that he mentions in other Wayne films, and what he does say about True Grit is shrewd and sympathetic, plausibly identifying Wayne's "best bit of dialogue" as occurring when the spunky Mat-tie has thwarted every attempt to leave her out of tracking down Ned Pepper's gang: "By God, she reminds me of me...
...On the other, Wayne blocks their way...
...Rooster Cogburn is for sure a "one-eyed fat-man" given to "bold talk"— but given as well to a self-irony neither cynical nor acquiescent, and redeemed by much more than the "comic flamboyance" noted by Wills...
...What shows through the minute commentary on Wayne's most important films is a kind of grudging affection on Wills's part for Wayne and the efforts of directorial geniuses (Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway) rather brashly trying to frame the American spirit in celluloid...
...Yes —but how does all this make John Wayne "menacing" and "the most dangerous man in America," the latter phrase lifted from a silly essay published in 1971 by theater critic Eric Bentley...
...Despite the intermittent sniping, Wills never really pushes the opportunities his topic gives him to be mean...
...interlude of quiet grief, a respectful silence in the audience was broken by a mock sob blurted by some oaf to whom scattered voices in the theater responded with fraternal remonstrance: "Knock it off...
...The face-down scene epitomizes what the Wayne image is about...
...So Garry Wills too may be a John Wayne fan despite himself, which brings us back to his blind spot on True Grit...
...Wayne had just completed the second stage of his career, according to Garry Wills in John Wayne's America...
...You couldn't hear the soundtrack over the uproar...
...Wills can't seem to disentangle two roles he's been caught up in for much of his forty-year writing career—seasoned social critic on the one hand and, on the other, perennial college sophomore in the first throes of ideological passion...
...But in the course of debunking the particulars of the Alamo legend, Wills inadvertently makes a case for Texan independence from the cruelty and fanaticism of Mexican rule...
...But there was nary the rustle of a popcorn bag when U.S...
...Nor does the witlessness attributed to Wayne jibe well with the huge credit Wills accords him for manipulating his own image...
...The odds are four to one...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
