The Life and Films of John Wayne, a weekly feature by Steve Newman

1 - Fort Apache

Looking at Wayne in John Ford’s exceptional film, Fort Apache, we are, at last, watching an artiste who has come to maturity. In fact, we’re watching several, including Henry Fonda, and John Ford himself.

With what has become known as the ‘Cavalry Trilogy’, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande - all made between 1947 and 1953 - director Ford found a genre, built upon his success with Stagecoach, that he was to make his own.

They are films that, for some, might seem trivial and unreal, little more perhaps than vehicles for the comedic genius of Victor McLaglan - plus comedy fist fights - or an excuse to show the Red Indians (and that’s what they were called in the 1940s and 1950s remember) being defeated by the US Cavalry yet again, or simply to show Wayne as a caring hero in comparison to - in Fort Apache - Henry Fonda’s strutting martinet of a commanding officer. Or - in Rio Grande - an excuse for Wayne, as an ageing officer still in love with his estranged and fiery wife, played by the gorgeous Maureen O’Hara - and confronted by the son he hasn’t seen in a while - to become a bit maudlin about, well about just about everything. Or, in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon we have an excuse, in the aftermath of Custer’s defeat and death at the Little Big Horn, to relish a fight between an outpost of the US Cavalry and thousands of Indians lusting for blood, plus the heroic stance of Wayne in his attempt to get the commanding officer’s wife and daughter to safety. In other words they might seem a bit shallow and, well, of little importance in the history of film making. Nothing is that simple. It’s not true either.

These films, made in the aftermath of World War II, are about fresh faced young recruits (like the fresh faces that had belonged to the tens of thousands who had been wounded and died only a handful of years earlier) being put through their paces by tough but kindly NCOs. These films are about patriotism and the flag, about sacrifice and courage, about the maintenance of order and ‘civilised standards’ in the wilderness, about creating an ideal of law and order and good manners within that wilderness that was worth fighting for. These films are about the contradictions implicit within those ideals, about the need to neutralise - kill - an indigenous population (who were not really indigenous at all, but had wandered across from Mongolia when the Bering Straits were frozen over) who were seen as a barrier to those ideals, and murdering heathens to boot. The Fort Apaches of the 1870s were the spearheads of the necessary movement west: the cutting edge of America’s own internal imperial expansion. And when you look at these films again they are statements, essays if you like, of that period in American history that cannot be changed or re-written. The films show those days as hard and cruel, but also as courageous, and they never - not once - portray the forebears of Ghengis Khan as anything other than a people defending themselves from the onslaught of a European invasion. It’s what happened, and the films tell that story pretty honestly, with pathos and heaps of humour, and wonderfully lingering direction, superb photography - plus Monument Valley of course - and some of the finest ensemble acting Hollywood ever produced.

Fort Apache was the start, and to quote Wayne biographer, Michael Munn…

” When John Ford cast him [Wayne] in Fort Apache, he was given the secondary role of Captain Kirby York, while Henry Fonda was given the lead role of Lieutenant-Colonel Thursday. However, Wayne received $100,000 for his part, which was the same amount that both Henry Fonda and Shirley Temple, now a beautiful teenager, received.

” Of course, Wayne was delighted to be working with Ford again, but he knew that Ford still didn’t consider him good enough to play a complex character like Thursday, an ambitious, glory-seeking hero from the Civil War who was based on General Custer.

” Wayne told me, ‘I could see the writing on the wall when Ford cast John Agar in the romantic role of Lieutenant O’Rourke, Hank Fonda in the lead role, and me just trying to make peace with the Indians.’”

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The Life and Films of John Wayne, a weekly feature by Steve Newman

The Angel and the Badman is not the greatest John Wayne film of all time, we shall come across that gem in due course, but it is a film that sets in place all those aspects of Wayne’s screen personae that are now so familiar to us, not least his humour. The film was also Wayne’s first collaboration with screenwriter James Edward Grant.

Journalist and novelist Grant had been knocking around Hollywood since the early 1930s trying to sell scenarios. And his ability to pitch a good story (usually made up on the spot) to a tired studio executive taking a quiet drink in a Burbank bar after a hard day invariably got him thrown out of the bar, that is until 1933 when Grant was hired at last (persistence was and is everything in Hollywood) to write the screenplay for Boom Town. The film was a hit and Grant was on his way.

Wayne and Grant hit it off when they met, in another bar, with Wayne realising immediately that he’d found a writer whose straightforward journalistic style was ideal for his, Wayne’s, first venture as a producer with Republic Pictures. It was the start of a long and productive relationship between the two men.

As Michael Munn writes in his 2004 biography of Wayne Grant’s idea for what became the 1947 feature, Angel and the Badman, was perfect Wayne territory

” It was the story of a wounded gunman taken in by a family of Quakers. Although he has sworn to kill the man who murdered his foster father, the Quaker girl he falls in love with persuades him to hang up his guns. Ultimately, he must face the man he’s been hunting, but the Quaker girl intervenes, and he hands her his gun. His father’s killer is finally gunned down by the local marshal.

” ‘ I liked the twist in the story,’ said Wayne. ‘The audience expected me to kill the man, and they’re surprised when I don’t.’

” Grant persuaded Wayne to let him direct the film, and they spent much of 1946 in pre-production. Wayne cast Bruce Cabot, who would become a close friend of Duke’s, as the father’s killer. Harry Carey played the marshal, and in the role of the Quaker girl was the delicately beautiful Gail Russell.

” Wayne had developed the habit of getting up early in the morning, no matter how late into the night he had been working - or drinking. All day long he and Grant worked on every detail of the production…Filming began in April 1947.”

In conversation with Munn Wayne admits that it…

“…was a big step for me, to produce…But I felt that if anyone was going to give my career a kick up the rear, it would have to be me. I knew that the film was a modest one, and a good one to start with. But the pressures of producing and acting were more than I’d realised, and I have to admit I gave tongue lashing to just about everybody more than was usual for me in those days. I found I was going around apologising to everyone all the time, and thankfully, because they were my friends, they forgave me.”

And the film does reflect that edginess, and Grant’s relentless forward movement that squeezes every ounce of vitality out of his own script - with one scene cutting quickly into the next and the next - punctuated only occasionally by Ford-like lingering moments that allows Wayne time enough to smile or exchange looks with Russell - and those moments are what make the film worth watching.

But what we also see in this film are future elements of many such movies where people are faced with an alternative lifestyle that is, if only for a moment, very attractive. This is extremely prevalent in Peter Weir’s 1985 film Witness, where Harrison Ford finds the charm of a young Amish widow - played by Kelly McGillis - enough to at least make him think of giving up being a cop. There can be no question that Witness writers William Kelley and Pamela Wallace used the emotional ethos, and simple storytelling tags of Angel and the Badman, to get their screenplay up and running.

And the on-screen chemistry we observe between Ford and McGillis is also there between Wayne and Russell…in bucketfuls!

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The Life and Films of John Wayne, a weekly feature by Steve Newman

Hilary and I have just finished watching Stagecoach, which for me is the first time in a couple of years, and it’s still the remarkable film I knew it to be.

It is also, without doubt, one of the most beautifully crafted films of the 1930s, a film where John Ford finds his true style - that of the lingering portrait shots, the misty eye, and the slow static camera set-up where the edges of the film almost become a cellular proscenium arch creating a shallow shadowed stage onto which his characters step, talk and depart, the camera watching like a spellbound audience. These static shots - invariably interiors - then suddenly break out into vast outdoor long shots which, in the case of Stagecoach, are invariably the breathtaking Monument Valley, before they dissolve (or occasionally cut) back into middle distance shots of fast movement over-arched with music before we move in to close-ups and dialogue. It’s simple film-making that is also a kind of cinematic poetry - let the image tell the story, let the dialogue help it along.

This remarkable film was shot in the foreboding months before the outbreak of World War II, and in a way the film’s very disparate group of outcast characters forced to leave town by stagecoach in a way represent the inevitable and violent break-up of Europe. Consequently they have to be seen as the inherent weakness and dishonesty of the old European order, and the intolerant small-mindedness and dishonesty of the new order - of the inherent racism of fascism and Nazism. Some of them, naturally, represent the honesty and decency of a more liberal centre ground (that part of the USA that was not isolationist) most obviously in the character of the US Marshall (who I feel represents Ford himself), and of course John Wayne’s Ringo Kid.

What we also get is 1930s Hollywood acting at its zenith: a style that gives us a genuine glimpse of what it might have been like to watch Booth the younger at his peak, especially in the wonderful grand posturings of Canadian actor Berton Churchill, whose long stage career had given him a style that suited the bombastic, flustered, guilty character of banker Elswood Henry Gatewood. His success in Stagecoach promoted Churchill quickly up the B list of Hollywood supporting actors; sadly he died less than a year after the film’s release.

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