The American Duke
BRUS, MICHAEL
The American Duke Garry Wills Deconstructs John Wayne By Michael Brus Garry Wills, who has pumped out books on the Kennedys, Reagan, Lincoln, and others, has now produced a "political biography"...
...The American Duke Garry Wills Deconstructs John Wayne By Michael Brus Garry Wills, who has pumped out books on the Kennedys, Reagan, Lincoln, and others, has now produced a "political biography" of John Wayne, a curious undertaking...
...Around the time of Sands, Wayne decided to lend himself to the anti-Communist cause, becoming president of the conservative Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals...
...But Wills's insights are buried under heaps of biographical and cinematic trivia and interrupted by windy excursions into mythological analysis...
...Though Wayne often descended into caricature, there was one director who could almost always get him to act—Ford...
...It smells like a set-up: The qualities that Wayne embodied, Wills has made a career of scorning...
...He is the avatar of the hero in that genre that best combines mythic ideas about American excep-tionalism...
...Halberstam...
...Pat Buchanan adopted his battle cries— "Lock and load!," "Saddle up...
...Well, out here, due process is a bullet," Wayne sneers...
...Not only that, but the Duke's "physical autonomy and self-command, the ease and authority of his carriage, made each motion a statement of individualism, a balletic Declaration of Independence...
...and in case the audience is nostalgic for World War II, there is the casting of venal Japanese as the Communists...
...John Wayne's America would make an interesting essay on how offscreen behavior influenced some of Hollywood's best, and worst, films...
...There is also the question of posture: "Wayne constantly strikes the pose of Michelangelo's David (see Figures 8a and 8b...
...He attracted notice in 1939 with Stagecoach, his first film with Ford, in which he dazzled as The Ringo Kid...
...A string of ideological films put this bravado on display...
...His conclusion—that Wayne, for good or ill, represents the dynamism of the American fronMichael Brus is a student at the University of Pennsylvania...
...After the war, Reagan's film career dwindled while Wayne's took off...
...You're telling me...
...While they were serving, Wayne made three films with Marlene Dietrich and wrecked his family with a high-profile affair with the actress Esper-anza Bauer...
...Take that, Mr...
...In 1952, Wayne played a HUAC bloodhound in Big Jim McLain...
...In 1960, he targeted candidate John Kennedy in an advertisement for The Alamo: "There were no ghostwriters at the Alamo," Wayne mocked, while the movie's publicist said that true patriots would never criticize the film...
...Many of his peers signed up to fight: Clark Gable (40 years old), Tyrone Power (28), Henry Fonda (36), Robert Montgomery (37), and Jimmy Stewart (33...
...And then Wills concludes that Wayne "embodies the American myth," the "American Adam—untrammeled, unspoiled, free to roam, and breathing a larger air than the cramped men behind desks...
...According to legend, he was lifting boxes on the Fox lot in 1929 when a director thought he "moved well...
...Sadly, Wills's metaphysical musings don't say much...
...and so does a psychopathic sergeant in Oliver Stone's Platoon...
...Newt Gingrich calls Sands "the formative movie of my life" and copied Stryker's walk...
...He ends with an 11-page "Conclusion," 9 pages of which are devoted to rambles about Emerson, Romulus, Ovid, Dreiser, Constan-tine, Henry Adams, and others before Wayne makes an appearance...
...And Ford got not only acting out of Wayne, but heart, body, and soul...
...Reagan did not serve abroad because he was practically blind without his contact lenses," Wills writes...
...Wills shows that much of Wayne's public behavior was compensation for private failings...
...When the war broke out, Wayne recognized the opportunity of a lifetime—as Wills notes, Wayne was "at the peak of his physical attractiveness, and the need for male stars was increasing as those in Wayne's age bracket went off to some form of military service...
...For one thing, Wills's obsession with the deconstruction of American icons leads him on tangents...
...Which is unexceptional and anti-climactic, leaving this odd book with little reason for being...
...Do we really need dozens of pages on how Wayne's Alamo differs from the real battle...
...The Green Berets, in addition to being racist, borders on camp—Wayne looks geriatric, the VC cower under evergreen trees (the filming was done at Fort Benning, Georgia), and the soldiers seem more concerned about shooting down liberal straw men than about real fighting...
...In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), for instance, Wayne shoots the last outlaw, then surrenders his vigilante power to the town's idealistic but wimpy sheriff (played by Jimmy Stewart...
...In short," Wills quips, "the dog ate his homework...
...So, Wayne got a father figure, and Ford got a strapping son to beat...
...Big Jim McLain, for example, looks like an episode of Dragnet filmed with plastic palm trees...
...But his military film work for the Signal Corps kept him from commercial movie making and definitely hurt his career...
...Wayne," Wills writes, "entered the ideological wars as he did World War II—retrospectively, and with compensatory bravado...
...From then on," Wills writes, "the man who evaded World War II service would be the symbolic man who won World War II...
...Wayne was 34 years old in 1941, with four children...
...Sometimes, with a wider throw of the hip, he becomes Dona-tello's David (see Figures 9a and 9b...
...Yet by that time, 1949, Wills argues, Wayne's new cause had already been won...
...As a book, however, it is turgid and directionless...
...He wrote to Ford that he could not fill out the proper military forms because he had no typewriter on location, and also that his wife, from whom he was not yet divorced, would not allow him to retrieve necessary documents from home...
...When the Depression hit, Wayne spent a tedious decade making low-budget serials...
...It was the only time Wayne ever walked off a set...
...There's something called due process," an idealistic newspaper correspondent whines to Wayne...
...Wayne's decision contrasts with that of Ronald Reagan, who at 32 was also coming off a breakthrough performance after years in B-movies...
...John Wayne got off to a slow start...
...While filming his World War II paean They Were Expendable (1945), Ford yelled, "Duke, can't you manage a salute that at least looks like you've been in the service...
...Wills argues that the director's "tough love" produced great westerns precisely because such love is the touchstone of the western hero...
...Ford could be brutal to his actors, and he especially loved to pick at Wayne's sores...
...The "Hollywood Ten" had been brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities two years before, and Congress had been investigating film-community Reds since 1939...
...And his confused sense of manhood led him to submit to the cruelties of tyrannical director John Ford...
...Most readers can grasp that the movie's flag-raising is a dramatization and realize that Wayne's purpose is to glorify a patriotic ideal, not to recreate a specific historical moment...
...The western hero is individualistic, unsettled, and violent when necessary, but not, Wills notes, a thug...
...The next year, it was Sands of Iwo Jima, in which he played the valorous Sergeant Stryker...
...Wayne's wartime flicks with Dietrich were not important in themselves, but he knew that they provided the credentials needed to make it big: In 1948, he became a superstar with Red River...
...The ideological purposes behind these films are magnified by their awfulness...
...In other words, he is something like Ford was with Wayne, and like Wayne was on camera...
...In The Searchers (1956), Wayne is enraged at his niece, who has "gone Injun," but, having finally cornered her, he reins in his hatred: He lifts her over his head menacingly, but then cradles her, saying, "Let's go home...
...And in 1968, Wayne played a swaggering Vietnam commando in The Green Berets...
...The actor's refusal to enlist during World War II, for example, led to a kind of penance afterward, when he practiced McCarthyite politics and made ideologically charged movies...
...To appreciate Sands, must we be dragged through a treatise on the Marines' manipulation of the Mount Suribachi flag-raising...
...And scorn he does, though not always unjustly...
...Tedious, too, is Wills's film criticism, which includes 20 pages on Stagecoach, complete with diagrams of seating arrangements on the coach...
...tier—is disappointingly banal...
...Wayne's father was a dreamy nonachiever," Wills writes, "and Wayne idolized John Ford, a hard taskmaster and ruthless professional...
...Read on, and Wills will inform you that, until he, Wills, came along, Wayne had "largely escaped such metaphysical attention...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 32
