John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [33]
Claire Trevor said, “I think Ford knew exactly what kind of performance he would get from Duke, and how he would get it—which was basically to bully him and humiliate him. He’d grab Duke by the chin to hold his head still and yell, ‘Don’t you know you don’t act with your head—you act with your eyes. Keep your goddamn head still.’”
John Carradine remembered, “Jack Ford really lay into Duke Wayne. He’d yell at him, ‘You dumb bastard, I should have got Gary Cooper. Can’t you walk like a man instead of a goddamn fairy?’ I 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 58
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know Claire felt sorry for Duke and gave him help. I just thought Ford was a sadist and just wanted to make sure that everyone knew who was in charge. The thing was, he treated Wayne like a newcomer, but he’d been making films for ten years or more. He’d learned his trade all right.”
But the bullying and cajoling that Ford dealt out made Wayne feel that the years he spent at Monogram and Republic developing his own style of movement had come to nothing. He’d later say that he realized Ford was simply pushing him to give his very best: “He sometimes got me so goddamn angry and so ashamed, that I wanted to murder the old son of a bitch.”
Wayne laughed when he said this, adding, “And he got me so scared to death that I was going to fail that I went to my friend Paul Fix and said, ‘You gotta help me. Jack’s gonna push me too far and I’m gonna deck him, and that’ll be the end of my career in movies.’
So unknown to Pappy, Paul would come over to my house at night and he’d help me. He taught me how to say my lines in a natural way and with sincerity.
“There were a lot of moments in the film when I had nothing to say. All I had to do was react to them. I knew that reacting naturally was important, but until Stagecoach I hadn’t realized just how important it is for a screen actor. You have to make it seem that you’re hearing all those words for the first time. All that crap about reacting and not acting; let me tell you something. Here’s my technique, and it’s oversimplified, but when you talk, talk low, talk as little as possible, and say it with sincerity.
“One day Pappy said, ‘Where’s that big oaf I cast as the Kid? I got some goddamn actor playing the part. Where’d he come from?’ He may have rode me hard, and he always did, but he was an absolute artist. He did what he had to to get what he needed, and he knew that the one thing that would make me do the job well was if I was scared enough to think I’d go back to being a B-Western actor; I wouldn’t say B-Western star because you couldn’t be a real star in those films.
And I sure wanted to be someone. I wanted to be good in Stagecoach, and goddamn it, I think I was.”
Filming stopped briefly for Christmas, and then continued again at Kerne River for the scene where the stagecoach had to cross 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 59
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the deep river, the horses swimming and dragging the floating stagecoach kept aloft by attached logs. Canutt recalled, “Mr. Ford was despondent about the scene because his wranglers had told him that it was impossible to do. But I told Mr. Ford, ‘It can be done and I think it will look terrific.’
“He said, ‘Can you do it?’
“And I said, ‘Yes.’
“I had four hollow logs made, two to go each side of the stagecoach. Real logs wouldn’t have worked. They needed to be hollow and have air in to keep them afloat. I also knew that the horses would never manage to pull the coach across as they’d have enough trouble swimming, so I just attached an underwater cable to the tongue of the coach, and the other end of the cable ran through a pulley out of camera shot. Using that cable, we dragged the coach across and it stayed afloat, and it looked just