John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [67]
He was openly critical of anything in the film business that he considered un-American. He denounced the film All the King’s Men which won the Oscar as Best Picture in 1949. He said the film “smeared the machinery of the country’s government” and that it would “tear down people’s faith in everything that they have been brought up to believe is important in the American way of life.”
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He had the full support of many including Ward Bond, stuntman Cliff Lyons, James Edward Grant, and Borden Chase. John Ford, however, tried to ease tensions in the industry by urging his ultraconservative friends to moderate their words and deeds. But this was one order from Ford that Wayne was not going to obey.
“We were just good Americans,” Wayne said, “and we demanded the right to speak our minds. After all, the Communists in Hollywood were speaking theirs. If you’re in a fight, you must fight to win, and in those early years of the Cold War I strongly believed that our country’s fundamental values were in jeopardy. I think that the Communists proved my point over the years.”
He made his views clear at special Crusade for Freedom rallies organized by the alliance. In one public speech in 1949, he said, “The past ten years the disciples of dictatorship have had the most to say and have said it louder and more often. All over the world they [the Communists] pour their mouthings into the ears of the people, wearing down their resistance by repeated hammerings of half-truths. That’s where our Crusade for Freedom comes in.”
It just so happened that in America in 1949 there was a representative for Joseph Stalin who heard about John Wayne and his Crusade for Freedom against Communism.
In 1983, Orson Welles was enjoying telling me of events taking place in Russia during the summer of 1936 which, he insisted, would later have a direct effect on John Wayne. “There was a noted Russian screenwriter called Alexei Kapler who just happened to be a Jew. Now, Joseph Stalin hated Jews, but he tried his best to keep his hatred to himself, although those closest to him knew he was completely anti-Semitic. Stalin knew of the advantage propaganda could play in motion pictures, and he decided that a film must be made about Lenin.
“And so he invited Kapler to his dacha in Kuntsevo, and commissioned him to write the screenplay. Kapler was a Jew, but he was also one of the very best screenwriters in the Soviet Union.
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advice, which neither Kapler nor Romm was foolish enough to turn down.
“Kapler’s script turned out to be far too long for one movie, so Stalin ordered him to turn it into two movies, with the titles Lenin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 (1939). Now Stalin had a young daughter, Svetlana, who was only thirteen years old at the time, and she fell madly in love with Kapler, who was a handsome man of thirty-four. At first, Stalin did not notice Svetlana’s infatuation with Kapler, but when he did, he accused Kapler of being a British spy and had him imprisoned in the Vorkuta camp.”
I asked Welles what all this had to do with John Wayne, and he replied, “I am getting to that. Be patient.” I quickly learned that when Welles was in full flow with a story, you didn’t interrupt him. He continued, “In 1949 Stalin sent a film director, Sergei Gerasimov, to America to attend the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York. He was faithful to the party line, and was honored by Stalin by being appointed as head of all the studios producing documentaries, the sole purpose of which was to promote Stalinism. In his speech at the conference, Gerasimov denounced Hollywood films as being devoid of any moral standards.
“He also heard that an actor called John Wayne