John Wayne: The Life and Legend (20 page)

Sherman couldn’t quite transcend the limitations of B western scripts, as Joseph Lewis and William Witney would, although he does frame more locations in the background than was common for westerns in this budget range, getting a sense of the landscape as a character.

New Frontier
would be the last of thirty-eight B westerns that Wayne had made since the debacle of
The Big Trail
. With
Stagecoach
grabbing reviews and earning money, Herb Yates realized that he had a star who had been hiding in plain sight for years. Actually, Yates had been wasting two stars—Phyllis Isley would soon change her name to Jennifer Jones and become one of the major leading ladies of the 1940s and 1950s, although not at Republic.

Herb Yates decided to promote Wayne to Republic’s version of A pictures. They called Robert Livingston back to work on the Three Mesquiteer pictures, while Crash Corrigan also took off, to be replaced by Duncan Renaldo. (There would eventually be fifty-one Three Mesquiteer pictures.)

Stagecoach
marked the smooth meshing of two monumental constructs. In the 96,000 acres of Monument Valley, John Ford found the ultimate frame for his pictures—sandstone buttes like fists punching through the earth’s crust, as well as delicate architectural spires rising toward the sky—a place of majesty and repose. Monument Valley gave the impression that it is as it has always been—permanent, implacable, sacred. At night, clouds descend and settle over the buttes and pillars like gods visiting their creation.

Ford had found the land he was born to put on the screen, as well as his mature style—meditative, with a symmetrical balance between character and theme.

And in his old pal Duke he had found a man to match the land.

1. 
New Frontier
is an anti–New Deal movie at a time when that was unusual. Residents of a town called New Hope are informed that they’re about to be flooded so their land can serve as a reservoir for a nearby city. The ranchers refuse to sell their land, defy the authorities and the construction team, and eventually win the right to stay.

1939–1952

“Republic. I like the sound of the word . . .”

Herbert Yates now set about building a two-pronged release strategy—the cheap westerns and serials would provide the foundational basis for the studio, while the more expensive pictures fronted by his new star would lift Republic to a higher level. The problem was that Yates had developed an effective system for the manufacture of low-cost movies that were reliably profitable, but he could never figure out an equivalent method for A pictures because he had only one star: John Wayne. As a result, most of Republic’s A pictures that starred somebody besides Wayne lost money.

For Bs, Republic had the popular Gene Autry, a pretty fair country singer who couldn’t act or perform a convincing fight. They also had a young wannabe named Roy Rogers, who could sing, ride, and be reasonably physical as well. Autry and Wayne shared similar tastes in scotch and spent years exchanging a standing joke: “Just think, Gene, if I hadn’t quit singing, you wouldn’t have happened,” Wayne would say, to which Autry would reply, “Well, Duke, it wasn’t my singing that made me a star. It was my acting!”

Republic’s first big post-
Stagecoach
vehicle for their new star was called
Dark Command,
about Quantrill’s Raiders. To show that Republic was serious about upgrading, Yates borrowed Walter Pidgeon from MGM and director Raoul Walsh from Warners. But before that, Republic loaned out Wayne to RKO for
Allegheny Uprising
, which began shooting precisely two days after he finished the eight-day-wonder
New Frontier
.

Instead of one week,
Allegheny Uprising
shot for a full eight weeks.
Dark Command
was a massive upgrade as well—it took over forty days. Critics as well as audiences had been alerted to the possibility of Wayne’s ascending star, and reacted accordingly. “John Wayne more than fulfills all previous promise,” wrote
The Hollywood Reporter
of
Dark Command
.

Raoul Walsh, who made
Dark Command
ten years after
The Big Trail
, said of Wayne, “He underacts, and it’s mighty effective. Not because he tries to underact—it’s a hard thing to do, if you try—but because he can’t overact. The trouble with most competent but ungifted actors, and that’s what the Duke is, is that they think they’re just wonderful. Wayne does not. . . . He’d read a script and shake his head. ‘I can’t do the part that way,’ he’d say. ‘It’s too hard. I’m not good enough for it.’ . . . You let Wayne alone, let him do the thing the way he feels he can, and he’s fine.”

So far so good. But as Wayne would learn, Republic would always be Republic—very good at their specialty, not very good at anything else. The character actor I. Stanford Jolley pointed out that serials and cheap westerns were primarily a training ground. “The high professionalism and teamwork at a small studio like Republic, with limited finances, could result in up to 100 [shots] a day. While over at MGM, say, if they got 10 [shots] a day, it was a small miracle.”

John Ford knew that Wayne had delivered for him, and on some level always would. Ford next cast Wayne in Dudley Nichols’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s
The Long Voyage Home.
Wayne read the script and always remembered the resulting fear. As he explained to me, “I was still under contract to Republic at the time.
The Long Voyage Home
was right after
Stagecoach
, but I was still doing six-day westerns. I’d finished one western at twelve o’clock at night and the next morning I had to start a picture where I was a Swedish sailor, presumably with an accent, with no chance for any coaching. I had to play a straight part as a Swede, and my accent couldn’t clash with John Qualen’s, who was playing a comic Swede. I want to tell you, that was quite a switch from the night before, knocking people around and jumping on a horse.”

Wayne’s memory was pardonably conflating Republic with cheap westerns. The picture he finished two days before starting
The Long Voyage Home
was not a six-day western but, rather,
Three Faces West
, a rather good Republic picture that cast Wayne as a young farmer trying to bring a doctor to his small town, and it had a shooting schedule of twenty days, not six.

But he was correct in that he was going from a stock part to something far out of his comfort zone: a sweet, unworldly sailor—with an accent. “I got to thinking of that long scene I was going to have to play with that woman [Mildred Natwick]—that he’d cut to her and she’d be doing everything, and I’d just have to sit there and read these [lines.]”

Wayne went to Ford and said he needed help. “Well, Jesus, all right if you want to be a goddamn actor,” said Ford. “You don’t need it.” But as far as Wayne was concerned, he did need it. Ford enlisted Osa Massen—she was actually Danish, but close enough—to give Wayne some coaching on the dialect.

“I took about two hours a day and went over the things that I was going to have to do. . . . [Ford] never heard it or anything until the day we were going to shoot and he said, ‘Well, sit down here and read the lines.’ I read the lines. He said, ‘All right, put the camera here.’ And he shot the scene. But that was the only really truly hard scene to do.”

Playing a sensitive character part at this stage of his career was potentially disconcerting because Wayne had already decided on a public strategy of pretending to be an awkward lug who never particularly wanted to be an actor. The kid who had been movie-struck since childhood, who was involved in theatricals since high school, who had pestered Jack White for acting jobs in two-reel comedies, was now bashfully insistent that “I just can’t act, that’s all,” and telling reporters that until Raoul Walsh had spotted him hauling a table across the Fox lot, he had never been the least bit interested in acting. Just an average boy from Glendale who played an average game of football, wanted to go to the Naval Academy and got waylaid. Life sure is strange.

A reporter visited the set of
The Long Voyage Home
on location at San Pedro harbor and noted the seriousness that permeated the set. There was none of the joshing typical of movie sets; Ford spoke very little, and when he did it was to the point. He sculpted the performances as surely as the setups, instructing Barry Fitzgerald to nod his head in a specific way, then demonstrating it. Ford and cameraman Gregg Toland consulted by taking turns looking through viewfinders and nodding agreement. Ford didn’t mind taking more time rehearsing if it meant less time shooting; as a result, most scenes were knocked off in one or two takes.

Wayne has what amounts to a supporting part behind Thomas Mitchell’s Driscoll, but Ford gives the younger actor top billing—a mark of his rapidly accreting commercial cachet after
Stagecoach.
Besides that, Wayne’s Ole is the focus of all the other sailors, who are determined to get him back to Sweden.

Ford sets up the atmosphere of frustration and yearning with his audaciously dialogue-free first scene, as the SS
Glencairn
anchors off a tropical island. While sultry music plays, native women on shore caress themselves in overtly sexual gestures. On the boat the sailors move restlessly about, unable to relax without release.

Ford makes
The Long Voyage Home
a tone poem, gets rid of as many medium shots—God’s most useless invention—as possible. Every composition is a knockout. But unlike, say, his film
The Fugitive
, also a nonstop progression of images suitable for framing, Ford never loses control of the story, or, rather, stories, as Dudley Nichols’s excellent adaptation stitches together four of Eugene O’Neill’s one-act plays.

Wayne’s Ole is a lot like his Ringo Kid—a rawboned farm boy with suspenders, but without a grudge that has to be settled. Most of the sailors are alcoholics—Ian Hunter in particular captures the drunk’s subterranean self-loathing. (The film reveals Ford’s true feelings about alcoholism, without the blowsy comedy he often utilized as a diversion.) When the men engage in a recreational brawl, Ole acts as the peacemaker. He’s the innocent younger brother, and the other men respect, love, and try to shelter him. He’s also the only man with a pet—a parrot.

Ford gives Ward Bond a good part, and an affecting death scene, redolent of fear, pain, and guilt. Wayne’s big scene comes near the end, in a run-down bar with some exhausted whores, in which Ole talks about his desire to go home. Wayne fights the accent to a draw, but effortlessly captures the character’s sweetness.

In the end, Driscoll is shanghaied while saving Ole, and dies when he goes down on the “devil ship
Amindra
.” The survivors load Ole on the ship bound for home and troop back to the
Glencairn
, a grim line of professionals who hate the sea, even as they’re continually drawn back into its grasp.

Like most of O’Neill, the movie is about lost souls and, beyond that, death. Besides Driscoll Yank (Ward Bond) dies, and the mysterious Smith (Ian Hunter) dies as well. Only Ole manages to be saved for a better life. Death shadows every moment of the film and whether a man lives or dies is mostly a matter of good or bad luck.

Ford and Nichols wisely strip out O’Neill’s long speeches; Ford communicates the Irish fatalism poetically, with his camera. And Ford understands sailors, so the film always feels emotionally true. (The main set is the tramp steamer, which was reused a few years later for the Val Lewton film
The Ghost Ship
.)

However potentially unsettling Wayne’s part felt, he’s utterly winning. Mildred Natwick, who played opposite Wayne, said, “I thought John Wayne was awfully good. . . . I liked him terribly much; he was helpful and good and easy to work with.”

With
Stagecoach
and
The Long Voyage Home
, Ford unlocked the romanticism in Wayne, a gentleness behind the rugged externals. To paraphrase the film historian Jeanine Basinger, in the same way that Michelangelo looked at a block of Carrera marble and saw the figure that needed to be released, so Ford looked at Duke Morrison and saw John Wayne—a capacity for strength and violence that coexisted with a dangerous beauty.