John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [108]
Wayne commented: “Pappy had been on the wagon, but after the accident, he began drinking again. We still had three more weeks of location shooting to be done, but Coach just lost the heart for it. I hated to see him like that. It damn well broke my heart. He suddenly canceled the remaining scenes and sent everyone home. I went back 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 201
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to Pilar, who was recovering well, and then three weeks later I got a call to go to the San Fernando Valley where Ford finished off the picture with the battle at the bridge all in one day. At the end of the day, he looked like such a broken man, I was convinced he’d never work again.”
It was bad enough for Duke seeing Ford looking like a broken man, but there was worse news to come. Grant Withers, Wayne’s friend of thirty years, had died. After battling with alcoholism for many years, Withers finally ended his misery by washing down an overdose of sleeping pills with vodka.
Although it had been twenty-seven years since Grant and Loretta Young had divorced, she was nevertheless upset when she got the news. She told me, “I was so glad to hear from Duke, who called to see how I was bearing up. Grant and I had been apart for many years, but I hated to see him going downhill for so long and finally take his own life. Duke thought the world of Grant, and I knew that he was just as upset about Grant’s death, but Duke’s only thought was for me.
“He knew I had become a practicing Catholic, and when I told him how despondent I felt, he said to me, ‘Have you tried talking to the man upstairs?’ I said that I’d had my faith tested severely and hadn’t felt like praying. He just said, ‘I think you ought to give it a try.’ And I did. And I felt so much better.”
Not too many months later, Loretta Young would be giving Duke the same kind of advice.
The Horse Soldiers was released in June 1959, and contrary to popular belief, it received some fine reviews. Arthur Knight wrote in the Saturday Review, “Its action scenes tingle with an excitement all too rare upon the screen these days. And the conflict between Marlowe and his surgeon major is projected with a surprisingly convincing intensity by John Wayne and William Holden. The script makes no effort to blunt the issues over which the war was fought, nor does it pretend that it was a glorious pastime.”
Paul Beckley, of the New York Herald Tribune, thought it “a flying slash and gallop and essentially romantic race through one of the stirring cavalry episodes of the Civil War.” Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times, “This is made supremely graphic and 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 202
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exciting by the touch of Mr. Ford and, what is more, some of it has the look of history seen through the mists of the years.”
Some critics, especially in recent years, have thought it inferior to what they perceived to be Ford’s “cavalry trilogy.” The Horse Soldiers, of course, is not a cavalry picture but a Civil War film and, despite its anticlimactic ending, it succeeded in many areas, particularly in its depiction of the horrors (by 1959 standards) of war.
It also featured good performances from Wayne, Holden, and Constance Towers and it somehow stands up well today, being far less dated than any of Ford’s cavalry pictures, apart from the obligatory cavalry song over the main titles.
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The Alamo
After at least ten years of preparation, Wayne was almost ready to make The Alamo. But before starting work on it, he broke one of his own rules and made a brief appearance on television. “It wasn’t completely unconditional,” he told me, “because it was as a favor to Pappy and Ward Bond. Ward was the star of the