John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [32]
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JOHN WAYNE
impressed. Compared to the cheap cowboy pictures he’d been making, this one had real class. Ford asked him if he had anyone in mind who could play Ringo, and Wayne, who had been impressed by Lloyd Nolan in the 1936 Western The Texas Rangers, replied,
“Why don’t you get Lloyd Nolan?”
“You idiot,” said Ford. “Don’t you think you could play it?”
Because Ford had never bothered to give Wayne a role since his minor appearance in Salute, it didn’t even occur to Wayne that Ford would have wanted him for a leading role in such a prestigious picture. Unfortunately, Ford did not have the final say in who played Ringo. It was down to Walter Wanger to decide.
When I spoke to Claire Trevor by telephone in 1979, shortly following Wayne’s death, she recalled, “Wanger made Duke test for the part. I already had the part of Dallas, and we had a very well-written intimate scene together, so I did the scene with Duke, and although he was a little nervous and perhaps even a bit wooden, you might say, he did well enough to persuade Wanger to take the gamble and give him the part. Besides, Wanger knew that Jack Ford was just the kind of tough director who could get a good performance out of anyone.”
Wayne’s agent, Charles Feldman, immediately recognized that Stagecoach could only enhance Wayne’s career and he persuaded Herb Yates to loan Duke to Walter Wanger and United Artists. “I don’t think Yates knew what this film could do for me,” said Wayne.
Filming began in October 1938 in Monument Valley, on the Utah-Arizona state line. Most of the footage Ford needed in Monument Valley was simply as a backdrop to the drama. It had a unique form of its own, with monolithic-type mountains. It also came complete with its own Navajo Indians whose reservation was on this land. The valley had never been filmed before, and Ford needed permission from the Navajos to use it. In return, he gave them work in the film, although it couldn’t be said that he allowed them to distinguish themselves, for, in that era, the Native American was always the arch enemy of the white man.
Yakima Canutt recalled, “Although Wayne was a B Western star trying to make his mark in an A film, he had experience that John 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 57
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Ford recognized and respected, and when Wayne urged Ford to give me the job of handling all the stunt work, Mr. Ford gave me a call.
When I met Mr. Ford for the first time in his office, he said, ‘Well, Enos, how are you?’ Enos is my real name, and nobody ever used it, so I said to Mr. Ford, ‘I see that Duke has given you all the inside dope on me.’ Mr. Ford said, ‘He has, and he’s said so much about you that you’re going to find it tough to live up to it all.’
“A lot of the stuff you see Wayne do in the film would normally be done by a stuntman. But Duke said, ‘If Yak says I can do it, I’ll do it.’ Many think that the famous scene in which the Indians chase the stagecoach was shot in Monument Valley, but it wasn’t. Just about before Christmas we moved to Victorville in California to shoot the chase scene on a dry lake. We needed very flat ground for that scene, and the dry lake provided it.
“While we were shooting the chase scene, Walter Wanger arrived to watch, and was horrified to see Wayne climbing up onto the top of the charging stagecoach. Mr. Wanger asked Mr. Ford why he was risking their new star’s life on something a stuntman could easily do. When Wayne heard about the complaint, he went over to Mr. Wanger to tell him that he had been doing dangerous stunts for years and that I had taught him exactly how to do this particular stunt.”
Canutt also helped Wayne rehearse. “When we were shooting in Monument Valley, we were staying at a small guest cabin