John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [57]
Wayne accepted, thinking that this might be an opportunity for him to try his hand at character roles; he feared that his days as a leading man might soon be over.
To play Matthew Garth, Hawks chose Montgomery Clift, a student from the Actor’s Studio in New York who’d never been before the cameras. Wayne had never heard of Clift, and met him for the first time in Hawks’s office. “I thought he was very odd,” said Wayne. “He wouldn’t look me in the eye. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and he was six inches shorter than me. I just didn’t think he had a chance against me. Shows how much I knew then!”
Principal photography began in September 1946, in a desolate area just east of Tucson in Arizona. Howard Hawks recalled,
“Wayne said to me, ‘Howard, this is not going to work.’
“I said, ‘Why’s that, Duke?’
“He said, ‘That kid isn’t going to stand up to me.’
“I said, ‘Well, why don’t we make the first scene.’
“So the first scene we shot was alongside a wagon. Wayne was talking tough, and Clift had a coffee cup, and he had it up to his face 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 106
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all the time. He never changed expression or anything. After the scene, we did another, and then Duke said, ‘I watched that kid the whole time. I think you’re right. He can hold his own. But one thing still bothers me; I don’t think he can keep up with me in a fight.
We’re supposed to have a fight.’
“I said, ‘Duke, I couldn’t keep up with you in a fight. But if I got a lucky chance and you fall down and I kick you in the jaw, that would be quite a fight and I think I’d have a good chance.’
“He said, ‘Okay, let’s do that,’ and so we had Monty kick him in the jaw.
“We took three or four days to do that scene and make Monty look good enough to be against Wayne because he didn’t know how to punch or move when we rehearsed. My arms got sore from showing Monty how to throw a punch. I think we made a good fight scene.”
It was the first time Hawks had worked with Wayne, and he was obviously impressed with his choice of star. Hawks said, “There’s a scene where Wayne has to make that walk through the cattle. Well, you didn’t have to tell Wayne how to do that; he just knew. He took his horse right up to the herd, and then he walked through them. The cattle would get in his way and he just shoved ’em and kept on walking. He never stopped.
“We had a story, written by Borden Chase, who turned in the first draft of the script. But I had Charles Schnee with me and we rewrote as we went along. I don’t really read scripts and shoot them. I just go out and make scenes. Monty had to learn about film technique—my technique, anyway. He was so intense and studied the script because he wanted to be word perfect. I said, ‘Monty, you don’t have to study lines. You don’t have to have them exact.’
“I called Duke over, and I said to Monty, ‘Give us a situation from the story,’ so he did, and then Duke and I just played the scene, improvising as we went, and Clift said, ‘I’ll be goddamned. You didn’t even know what scene I was going to pick.’
“See, Wayne never read a script that I had. He’d say, ‘What am I supposed to do in this?’ and I’d say, ‘You’re supposed to give the impression of this and that.’ And he’d say, ‘Okay.’ He’d never learn lines before I talked to him, because he said that threw him off. He could memorize two pages of dialogue in three or four minutes, and 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 107
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then he just goes and does it. He’s the easiest person I ever worked with because he doesn’t discuss it and try to fine-tune it; he just goes and does it without squawking.
“I had not planned to make Wayne the heavy. It was just a good part that resembled the story of the King Ranch, a man who was there at the beginning and built one of the greatest ranches in the world.
Wayne took that part and made him the heavy and also made him sympathetic. That’s what Wayne did with the part.
“What you get from Wayne is authority. He looks like he belongs in Western