The Warner's B Westerns were, by and large, formulaic like all genre pictures. In most of them the Duke and his horse Duke were sent to some town, generally to take care of the bad guys. In good formulaic genre fashion the Duke defeated the bad guys, found the girl, who generally had some relationship, with a crypto bad guy, and eventually, one presumes, got the girl. Of the four Warner's B Westerns I watched I found Haunted Gold to be the most interesting thanks to its attempt to marry the Western genre to the Gothic genre. That said, I don't think I would watch any of these films again for entertainment or educational purposes.
The Duke's war films I watched were really not that different from his Western films. The Duke and his band of merry good guys beat back the bad guys (be they the Japanese or the Vietnamese) with the help of their buddies (be they Filipino guerillas or the South Vietnamese) at, in the case of The Green Berets, the appropriately named Dodge City, pointing, in the process, up the close ties between the American Western and the American war film.
After watching these films I decided to read Garry Wills's book John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), a book I have wanted to read for some time. The book, by the way, was published as John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity by Faber and Faber in the UK and Australia.
For Wills "John Wayne" is an American symbol grounded in several American myths including the key American myths of the frontier with its wide open spaces, uniqueness and exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and wilderness where some American men, like "Wayne" go in order to remain untrammeled and free to roam men.
It took years, as Wills notes, for Marion Morrison to become the American symbol "John Wayne". Three directors would, according to Wills, play major roles in the creation of the mythic Duke: Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, and John Ford. In Walsh's 1930 film The Big Trail, the first film "Wayne" got star billing in, Walsh created a "Wayne" who was at ease in the wild, so at ease, as "Wayne's" physical movements show, that he was almost a part of the wilderness of the American West. In Howard Hawk's Red River (made in 1946 but not released until 1948, Monterrey Productions, Hawks's company, and United Artists), a film that gave birth to the post-World War II symbol of the "Duke", Hawks created a "John Wayne" who was melancholy and weighed down by a sense of responsibility. In the 1950s and 1960s "Wayne" became the symbol of Cold War American imperial power, thanks, in part, to John Ford films like The Searchers (Warner Brothers, 1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Paramount, 1962), and the anti-communist action adventure film Big Jim McLain (Warner Brothers, 1952), a film in which "Wayne" stars as a HUAC investigator.
When I was a postgraduate student at the University of Notre Dame I sat in on an American Studies seminar offered by Wills while he was a visiting scholar in South Bend. It was a very interesting experience. So was reading his cultural historical study of "John Wayne" the symbol, the John Wayne who went to war only on celluloid--something for which, John Ford, who did go to war, apparently never forgive "Wayne" for--and the "John Wayne" who became the very symbol for many Americans--Wills calls them Wayneoliters--of America itself, of American individualism, of American destiny, and of real Americanism.
There were several things I liked about Wills's book including his emphasis on culture, the interplay of culture, politics, and biography, his emphasis on "Wayne" as an actor, and his emphasis on "Wayne's" celluloid body movements and speech patterns. There were a few things that annoyed me about the book. Wills poo pahs auteurism at one point noting that film is a collaborative medium. At the same time, however, he praises and explores the themes of directors like Walsh, Hawks, including Hawks's role in reworking the scripts of Red River, and Ford, making the case for auteurism in the process. Additionally, there were times I felt Wills got a bit off the beaten track such as when he went on for several pages about the history of the Alamo in his chapters of "John Wayne's" film The Alamo (Batjac, United Artists, 1960). It was and interesting digression but a digression nevertheless.
Some Wayneoliters, by the way, have been critical of Wills's book. But for them "Wayne" is not a symbol. For them the myth is the "reality".
Recommended.
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