John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [186]
And yet today, in a world of political correctness, his films continue to thrill and entertain. There are still young men who join the American marines because they are inspired by John Wayne’s heroics in Sands of Iwo Jima. In 1995, a poll among Americans put John Wayne at the top of a list of the most popular film stars—and that was sixteen years after he died and nineteen years since his last film had been released.
His legend lives on in many forms. The airport in Orange County in southern California, a tennis club, a cancer clinic at the University of California in Los Angeles, and a school in Brooklyn, have all been named after him.
On video and DVD his films continue to sell more than any other star’s, living or dead. You could put forward the argument that he sells more videos because he made more films than just about anybody else. In fact, there are many of his films which have never been made available on video or DVD. Certainly the few outstanding films he made are available, and many of the modestly good films too. You can even buy many of his pre- Stagecoach B
Westerns, few of which could even be considered moderately good.
But people continue to buy them. They buy them simply because John Wayne is the star.
Perhaps because he made so many bad movies, perhaps because of his right-wing politics which made him unpopular in many quarters, the critics of the past refused to take him seriously 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 350
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because John Wayne usually only ever played John Wayne. Yet today, critics delight in dissecting his varied characterizations because now they have a complete body of work they can look back on and analyze, and they see that there are exceptions to the rule.
When his most personal film, The Alamo, was released in 1960 the critics slaughtered it. Yet today, the same film, like many of the epic films of the early 1960s which also came in for heavy critical flack, is recognized as an example of an art form now lost and treasured, and which can only hope to be imitated by the use of computer-generated images and MTV-style editing. The Alamo is constantly being reissued on video and DVD, as well as turning up on television, as the critics of today see something in it that those of 1960 failed to notice.
I admit that I have long been a Wayne aficionado. I have scrapbooks on Wayne that I pasted up when I was a boy. I’ve seen most of his films, although I can’t claim to have seen them all because there are still some of his movies that have not been shown in my lifetime. I have interviewed many people who knew and worked with him. And I’ve had the privilege to spend time with him.
What I learned about him—the secret he kept from many, even from his own family, as far as I could tell—has only served to reinforce my admiration and my fondness for him.
When he died, I grieved. I was a staff writer at the British version of Photoplay at the time, and my editor asked me to write a tribute.
I had collected many interviews about Wayne from his friends and colleagues over the years. Now I set about making contact with more of them on the other side of the Atlantic, to get, at my own expense from my own home telephone, the memories and emotions of those who knew him best.
In his lifetime his style of patriotism came in and out of fashion with the times. He was a man who was proud to be an American, and a man America was, at times, proud to have represent its purest virtues. He believed that there was no greater country in the world than America, and that it bore the heavy responsibility