John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [14]
“Ford happily conducted intelligence activities on his own initiative without pay or official recognition. I didn’t know it then, but while we were filming Salute, he met with naval intelligence 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 22
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leaders and was given a mission to go to the Pacific. His official job was to research and film sequences for his next film, Men Without Women, but unofficially he was reporting on harbor access and defenses.”
Morrison and Bond were both in Men Without Women, the story of a submarine damaged and trapped on the ocean floor with fourteen men on board. Another legend has built up around Wayne’s involvement in this film. It’s been claimed that when Ford was filming a scene in which the men of the submarine have to dive into choppy water, the stuntmen were too afraid to take the plunge. So Ford said, “Duke, get in the water,” and Duke obliged by diving into the rough sea.
Wayne confirmed the story when I asked him about it, but Yakima Canutt said, “There’s no doubt Duke was fearless and he did do a lot of his own stunts, but I’d be ashamed of any stuntman who couldn’t do a simple thing like jump into the sea. That just doesn’t sound right to me.”
In the first few films Wayne appeared in at Fox, his roles were so small he received no billing. But when he played a student in a 1929
musical, Words and Music, he received credit, way down the cast list, as Duke Morrison. Although the studio found him occasional work as an extra, his main living was as a propman. But he was making friends on the Fox lot, and one of these was George O’Brien, one of the studio’s leading romantic actors. O’Brien was able to get Duke a small role in the 1930 film Rough Romance, although he was still way down in the cast list, as he was in Cheer Up and Smile, also in 1930 and again playing a student.
“Through my friendships with John Ford and George O’Brien,”
Wayne told me, “I was made to feel like I belonged on the lot. I just loved going to work at Fox, and I began to feel this was my life.”
Life for Duke Morrison was about to change forever—and so was his name.
Raoul Walsh told me, “When sound first came to movies in 1927, the studios thought that sound would be unsuitable for Westerns. They felt that sound meant you had to have plenty of talking, which is why 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 23
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they called the first sound films ‘talkies,’ and the studios asked,
‘Who wanted to see a Western crammed with talking?’ There was also the practical problem of filming with sound. The cameras were big and noisy and had to be enclosed in a box to prevent the noise being picked up by the microphones. The studios had converted all their stages to ‘soundstages’ where the heavy cameras could not be easily moved. Silent cameras were easy to move and pioneers of the cinema had developed techniques such as ‘tracking shots’ [whereby the camera moved along with the action].
“But I believed Westerns could be made with sound. I liked the idea of being able to hear hoofbeats and gunfire. But no one had tried filming outside of a studio soundstage. Then in 1929 I saw a Fox Movietone newsreel in which a longshoreman was interviewed in the open by means of recording equipment housed in a specially constructed wagon.
“I headed straight for the nearest phone and called a production executive at Fox and said, ‘I want to make a Western with sound.’
“The executive said, ‘Are you drunk?’
“I said, ‘No. Get me a Fox Movietone News wagon.’
“So I got my wagon and I adapted a story called ‘The Cisco Kid’
into the first major sound Western [ In Old Arizona].”
The film won an Oscar for its star, Warner Baxter, and Paramount quickly jumped on the Movietone bandwagon and made The Virginian with Gary Cooper in 1929.
Sound Westerns were a success after all, and studio technicians had to devise a more convenient means of filming outdoors. Fox even came up with a new