John Wayne: The Life and Legend (11 page)

Walsh and Arthur Edeson weren’t able to see rushes until they got back to Hollywood—they were shooting 500,000 feet of 70mm film flying blind. The filmmakers found that most of the difficulties of the new system fell on the director, because he had to pay more attention to the background action—“the depth of focus demanded by Grandeur makes the background an important part of the picture,” noted Edeson.

Walsh compensated for his thin story by filling his movie with epic scenes: a buffalo stampede, an Indian attack on the wagon train, thunderstorms, blizzards, and, especially, the transport of cattle and wagons over the mountains, done just as the pioneers had done it sixty and seventy years before. At times, the film is less like a Hollywood movie than a beautifully composed newsreel circa 1870.

For that awe-inspiring sequence of getting over the mountains, Walsh and company decided on a cliff on Spread Creek. “Expert packers were up hours before daylight and lashed heavy camera equipment on horses and mules and packed them up the steep backbone of the ridge behind the cliff,” wrote Hal Evarts. “Heavy sound trucks were windlassed up grades that no car could have made under its own power. Everything was ready. Then a storm blew in over the Tetons.”

After several days of rain, Walsh finally got his scene. “Lowering wagons and stock down that cliff by log booms and pulleys was a tough job,” wrote Evarts. “Once lowered, it required an hour or more to get a wagon from the bottoms to the top of the cliff again. Stock hands worked tirelessly. Hollywood extra women went down ropes hand over hand, risking their lives again and again. Later, certain of them were delighted to find that an extra five dollars a day had been added to their pay checks for the period they had put in on the cliff location.”

By the time the cast and crew were done with the eight weeks of locations in and around Jackson Hole, they had been away from home for nearly four months—Walsh, Evarts, and a few others for a lot longer than that. After the last shot was taken in August, Walsh ordered the company bugler to play “Taps,” and much of the company was dispersed, although a small second unit went up to Montana to shoot the buffalo sequence for two days. For the final sequence, Walsh took Wayne and a small crew to Sequoia National Park to shoot the conclusion, and with that the saga of the making of
The Big Trail
came to an end.

Wayne emerged from his trial by fire with reservations about Walsh—not as a director, but as a human being. On one of the last days of production, Walsh volunteered to stand in for Wayne in a scene that called for a close-up of Ian Keith getting punched. It was Keith’s last shot of the film, and Walsh told Keith he’d feint with his left but would throw his right. During the take, Walsh feinted with his right and threw his left, sucker punching the actor because of his attentions to Walsh’s wife.

On the train ride back to Hollywood, Wayne was playing cards when somebody came and told him he was needed in an adjacent car to break up a fight. Some of the stuntmen were beating an actor named Frederick Burton half to death.

It seems that Walsh believed that Burton was fooling around with either his wife—it would seem Mrs. Walsh got around—or his mistress. Wayne was fuzzy on which woman was involved, but he remembered Burton’s name, and he also remembered that Walsh had told the stuntmen to take care of his business. Wayne broke up the fight, but he never regained respect for a man who delegated his dirty work.

As the picture went into postproduction, everything seemed to be coming together for its young star. Fox executives forecast a gross of $4 million for
The Big Trail
, and they believed that John Wayne was going to become another Tom Mix; they lined up two more westerns for him:
Wyoming Wonder
and
No Favors Asked
.

The Big Trail
opened in Hollywood at Grauman’s Chinese on October 2, 1930. Grauman’s forecourt was turned into a frontier encampment, and the short preceding the feature was a Movietone interview with George Bernard Shaw. In attendance for the premiere was an interesting conglomeration of notables from a variety of studios: Alexander Korda, Henry King, Victor McLaglen, Frank Borzage, Irving Thalberg, Marie Dressler, Louis B. Mayer, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Walter Huston, George Bancroft, Gary Cooper, Buddy Rogers, Lupe Velez, and Nancy Carroll. Also attending were Clyde Morrison, his new wife, and his son the movie star. Wayne’s Sigma Chi fraternity from USC gathered to pay homage to their former brother at the premiere.

Fox flooded papers all over the country with publicity and photographs, and a lot of papers played along: “Sweeping Across 7 States . . . The story of a Love Enduring Untold Hardships . . . Fighting merciless savages . . . Imperiled by stampeded buffalo . . . Driving battered wagon trains across searing deserts . . . Starving . . . Thirsting . . . Lovers Fighting side by side . . . In the most glorious and thrilling adventure you ever witnessed.” Mainly, the thrust of the ads was Manifest Destiny: “Thrills! Adventure! Romance! In 1001 gripping patterns woven from the bone and sinew of the heroic souls who bartered comfort, security and life itself for a share in the vision of the West.”

Some of the ads were devoted to building up the new star, with a dramatic charcoal drawing of the young man and introductory copy: “John Wayne—Acclaimed by critics—hailed by the public.”

Fox also decided to give its new star what might be called backdoor publicity. An article in
Motion Picture
magazine devoted most of its length to the dreary workaholic nature of young stars, who worked, studied, apprenticed, and lacked the colorful theatrical flourish of silent stars such as John Gilbert.

At the very end of the article, in a postscript, John Wayne brings up the rear as a prop man spotted by Raoul Walsh. “And—in a twinkling—the young man was under contract and was announced as the lead for the picture. Meet Mr. John Wayne, new motion picture celeb!”

Oddly, the ads and publicity didn’t mention Grandeur, because the 70mm equipment was apparently installed only at Grauman’s and New York’s Roxy. Most of the country saw the film in the conventional 35mm version that was advertised as “All Talking Fox . . . The Most Important Picture Ever Produced.”

Many critics rhapsodized:
Film Daily
said that the “impressive epic of the west has the romance, colorful background, action and thrills for universal appeal . . . John Wayne, as a frontier scout, [scores] big.” “Photography soars to new and unscaled heights in Raoul Walsh’s great epic of the west,” wrote Elizabeth Yeaman in the Hollywood
Daily Citizen.
“John Wayne, a newcomer to the screen, is most prepossessing in appearance. In his buckskin suit, his long, lean physique presents a picturesque character. He was not an actor when Walsh selected him for this picture and did not become an actor in this picture. As a consequence, his every word and deed is outstanding for its naturalness and naïve force.”
The New York Times
thought that the movie was as stimulating as John Ford’s
The Iron Horse
, which it termed “that old silent film classic.” (
The Iron Horse
was all of six years old at the time.)

Others weren’t so sure about the picture or its star. Sime Silverman in
Variety
thought that the film “will do a certain business because of its magnitude, but it is not a holdover picture.” Silverman also said that the filmmakers had erred by refusing to cast stars in the picture. “Young Wayne, wholly inexperienced, shows it but also suggests he can be built up.”

Wayne traveled east to do some publicity for the picture dressed in his buckskin costume and holding his rifle. The photographers shot him as he posed in the doorway of his train compartment, holding a rifle in one hand and tipping his white hat in the other (in the film he wears a black hat). Nobody bothered to remind Wayne that he was wearing a wristwatch.

The Big Trail
is a film of diametric opposites: awe-inspiring visuals and stilted acting. Wayne, twenty-two years old at the time the film began shooting, is a stunning physical specimen—tall, rangy, extremely handsome. The historian Jane Tompkins was struck by the difference between the Wayne of
The Big Trail
and the later, leathery Wayne: “The expression of the young John Wayne . . . is tender, and more than a little wistful; it is delicate and incredibly sensitive. Pure and sweet; shy, really and demure.” The difference is that the young man was the authentic Duke Morrison; the older man was the hardened construct called John Wayne.

The young version is sometimes awkward in his line readings, and his reactions are occasionally over the top, as they often were in the first phase of his career. Nevertheless, for a kid who was lugging props a few months before, a kid with aptitude but little training or experience, he’s not bad, and his star quality is fully present.

Most importantly, the film presents Wayne’s screen character in rough sketch form. Despite his youth, Breck Coleman is tough and in charge, with a natural air of command that’s accepted by the other characters. “You fight, that’s life,” he asserts at one point. “You stop fighting, that’s death.” It’s a line that could have been dropped into
Red River, The Searchers, The Alamo
, or any major Wayne movie from the coming decades. If the western is the foundational myth of America in movie form, then Breck Coleman is the rough, occasionally halting foundation myth of John Wayne.

The young star’s combination of physical strength and grace is already apparent. In his otherwise surly book about Wayne, Garry Wills was amazed by a throwaway shot in which Wayne comes up behind a woman, lifts her by her elbows, flips her around so she’s facing him, and hugs her. “He does not
throw
her, even slightly, and catch her after turning her; he just handles her as if she were an empty cardboard box, weightless and unresisting.” Wayne’s physical and emotional strength were always matched by an equivalent control and sense of purpose; at the beginning of his career or at its end, he never made a clumsy gesture.

Marguerite Churchill is attractive and professional but not distinguished, and Tyrone Power Sr. gives a roaring performance of pure ham—he makes Wallace Beery look subtle—that seems to have been the model for the Wolf in Disney’s
The Three Little Pigs
. Ward Bond shows up on the periphery sporting a beard.

A passion for performance was clearly present in Wayne very early, but so was an uneasiness with his choice, the same uneasiness that would be present in the lives of other actors: Barrymore, Flynn, Holden, etc. Perhaps acting was an unsuitable job for a man? Wayne would spend the rest of his life insisting that he wasn’t an actor, he was a reactor, which was really just a backdoor way of asserting his masculinity.

In truth, Wayne instinctively grasped something very close to the modern American concept of acting, which emphasizes behavior over the dialogue-based English tradition. Behavior works for all sorts of parts, but is insufficient when confronted with, say, Shakespeare, which has to be spoken. But Wayne’s characters would always be defined as much by movement and attitude as by words.

Raoul Walsh’s shots are much more carefully composed than most of his work; the dimensions of the 70mm frame mandate a lot of extras and background action, and the lenses don’t let Walsh get any closer than a chest close-up. The lack of intimacy is compensated for by the majestic long shots. Generally, Walsh frames his shots so as to leave a third to a half of the frame open to landscape or background action.

Walsh’s images made
The Big Trail
an authentic epic, but they weren’t able to prevent it from being an authentic epic flop. It ran for eight weeks at the Chinese Theatre—a good run—but only two weeks at the Roxy. More importantly,
The Big Trail
underperformed in conventional 35mm showings in the rest of the country. Theater chains, having just expensively retooled for sound, weren’t interested in expensively retooling yet again. Absent any widespread public demand for 70mm, it was easier to just let it wither away.

Unfortunately, the 35mm version of the film didn’t fully show off the film’s primary virtues—its physical re-creation of the pioneer experience. The mini-widescreen boom of 1929–1930 died quickly, and went underground until revived in the early 1950s as a means of luring audiences back to the movies after the erosion wrought by television. (More people have seen the widescreen version of
The Big Trail
since its rediscovery in 1986 than ever saw it in 1930.)

Winterset, Iowa, finally got to see the movie in January 1931. The
Madisonian
featured the story with the headline: “John Wayne, a Winterset Boy, in Talkies at the Iowa.” The story continued, “John Wayne is the stage name of Marion Michael Morrison, as he was known to all his friends.”

With a negative cost of $1.7 million,
The Big Trail
amassed only $945,000 in domestic rentals, another $242,000 in foreign rentals. The foreign language versions added $200,234 to the budget, and returned a tiny profit of $9,264. When the accountants had completed their grim task, it was clear that
The Big Trail
was a financial bloodbath—the loss topped $1 million.