John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [140]
Wayne had a curious point of view on ethnic, or any minority, groups: “The white man made the black man a slave, and that was an evil thing to do. We’ve all got to live side by side. What’s past is past.
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I’m just saying that people should stop bellyaching about how bad they’ve got it because there are still white people who don’t like black people, but the Negro has got to rise above that and say, ‘I’m an American first and foremost and I’m damn lucky to have been born here where I can get an education and enjoy my liberty.’
Because there are a lot of black people who aren’t so lucky. Look at South Africa. Look at the African nations that have civil wars. I’m tired of hearing the words ‘black American.’ I don’t go round saying
‘I’m a white American.’ I’m just an American, goddammit.
“So-called minority groups need to stop being in the minority and join the majority. They shouldn’t let what other people say keep them in the minority because that’s what happens. Someone says, ‘You’re black so stay in your place.’ The black guy should say, ‘I’m an American’ or ‘I’m an Englishman’ or whatever free country they are lucky to live in, and they should say, ‘I’m going to show you what I can do,’ instead of saying, ‘Treat us better because we’re browbeaten and downtrodden.’ I got no time for that.”
Apart from Wayne’s lack of sympathy for minorities, Shavelson had no complaints with the performance Wayne gave him. He said,
“Duke was able to give me the one thing I needed and couldn’t film authentically, and that was the horror of the death camps. I didn’t want to use the color newsreels that were shot—some of them by George Stevens. I felt to use that kind of footage in a movie would have been plain disrespectful to the victims. And I couldn’t re-create it because there is no way the most brilliant makeup artist in the world could make even the thinnest extras look like the survivors of the death camps. The only way to do it was to tell the audience what Wayne’s character was seeing when he comes across the death camp by showing it in his eyes. It was a feat of acting I wasn’t sure Duke could bring off. He needed to begin with a look of disbelief which gradually grows to outrage. And he did just that. I didn’t realize how effective it was until I saw the rushes, and what Duke produced was not only effective but profoundly moving. Don’t anyone say that John Wayne can’t act.”
Considering Wayne’s contribution to the film, it comes as a surprise to realize he worked only four days on the film during 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 263
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August 1965, in Rome, and while the rest of the unit continued to film in Italy and then move on to Israel, Wayne returned home.
Work was waiting for him in Old Tuscon, Arizona, in October 1965.
It was another Western, El Dorado, directed by Howard Hawks, who would never admit that the film was a virtual remake of Rio Bravo, with a few twists. Hawks would argue that El Dorado didn’t tell the same story as Rio Bravo or feature the same characters. Both films, however, featured a bunch of lawmen, one of them being a drunk, trying to keep order in a border town and finding themselves holed up in the jail. And instead of having a sober sheriff Wayne with a drunk deputy Dean Martin as in Rio Bravo, El Dorado featured a drunk sheriff, played by Robert Mitchum, with Wayne playing pretty much the same kind of character he did in Rio Bravo but without a badge. In place of old-timer Walter Brennan there was old-timer Arthur Hunnicutt, and instead of Ricky Nelson as a young man deadly with a gun, there was James Caan as a young man who was lousy with a gun. In Rio Bravo Wayne was still young