John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [22]
Canutt sauntered over and crouched beside him. Both men were too tired to talk. Wayne just handed Canutt the bottle, and between them they finished off the contents. It was the moment, Canutt said, when they became lifelong friends.
Between them, Wayne and Canutt take credit for inventing the technique of realistic screen fighting. “You look at other films of the period or earlier, and you see these guys bashing away at each other’s shoulder,” said Canutt, “and it never looked real. What Wayne and I did was develop a way of standing at a certain angle to the camera and throwing punches to the face, just missing but looking to the camera like the fist had made contact. In fact, I would say that no one has ever been able to make a screen fistfight look as good as Wayne, even when he was older.”
When they finished Shadow of the Eagle, they went straight to work on the next twelve-episode serial, The Hurricane Express, a contemporary drama about a rivalry between a railway and an air-transport line, allowing for plenty of action on trains, airplanes, and cars.
With hardly a break, Wayne went back to Warner Bros. to make two more Westerns for them, The Telegraph Trail and Somewhere in Sonora. Among the cast of Somewhere in Sonora was Paul Fix, who would become Wayne’s close friend, unofficial drama coach, and a regular in many of Wayne’s films.
Wayne next found himself in the Mojave Desert filming his third Mascot serial, a supposedly updated version of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers in which the French foreign legion are pitted against the 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 38
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marauding Arabs. One of the stars was Noah Beery Jr. who told me in 1979, “Duke was a great guy to be with and work with. He was always on the set on time. And it was a difficult picture to make. We filmed in the Mojave Desert where it got to one hundred and twenty degrees during the day. We had two directors [Armand Schaefer and Colbert Clark] each shooting different scenes, and Duke was going from one to the other. We never had much dialogue to say because it was virtually all action, but I believe it was on those Mascot serials that Duke really began to get a sense of how to work in front of a camera, and how to move.”
John Wayne said of his Mascot experience, “We didn’t have a hell of a lot of dialogue, and we didn’t fool around with retakes. Usually it was the first take we printed. Even though there wasn’t much dialogue, I had to learn my lines quickly, and I’ve always been able to memorize lines quickly. I learned how to do stunts too, and whenever I could I’d do my own stunts.”
The first two Mascot serials were released toward the end of 1932, and the third early in 1933. Along with the Westerns Wayne made at Warner Bros., the serials were delighting a young audience to whom John Wayne had fast become a screen hero, and to them he was already a star.
There was a brief respite from action films when Warner Bros.
cast Wayne in the minor role of the manager of a department store in Baby Face in 1933. The film starred Barbara Stanwyck as a woman who finds her way to success in business by using her charms on the men she meets on the way up. Wayne was one of those she met, and he was on screen for all of two minutes.
Then he accepted a leading role in a minor film, His Private Secretary, for a minor studio, Showmen’s Pictures. He played a rich man’s son who can’t take his mind off girls long enough to make a success in his father’s business. Evelyn Knapp played the granddaughter of a church minister who finally makes him see the error of his ways and reunites him with his father. The film remains one of Wayne’s least known and has hardly been seen since its release in June 1933.
He was soon back in the saddle, riding Duke the Miracle Horse in The Man from Monterey, the last of the six B Westerns he made 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 39
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for Warner Bros. He was quickly snapped up in the spring of 1933
by Lone Star Westerns which made only B Westerns for another Poverty Row studio,