John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [70]
“Some of the young actors in the film, including me, tried to match Duke drink for drink, but he took particular delight in outdrinking all of us. I don’t know how he did it. In the morning we’d all turn up all hungover, and Duke would just be fresh and eager to work. Allan Dwan decided to teach us a lesson and had a real drill sergeant put us through our paces. We never stayed up later than ten o’clock after that, even though Duke did. He just didn’t want to be alone with his wife.”
Released in December 1949, the film was a huge hit, and Wayne received an Oscar nomination as Best Actor. But as good as he was as Stryker, it didn’t compare to the superior performances he gave in Red River and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Nevertheless, Duke was thrilled to be recognized at last by his peers and, as far as the cinemagoing public was concerned, the role of Stryker only enhanced his patriotic image even more.
It also enhanced his commercial image, with Sands of Iwo Jima coming in eighth position in Variety’s 1950 list of top moneymakers.
Wayne was keen to express his political beliefs—or at least his anti-Communism— on screen, a view he shared with Howard Hughes. And so in 1949 Wayne made one of the oddest films of his entire career, Jet Pilot. Janet Leigh played a Soviet pilot who pretends to defect to America where Wayne, as a colonel in the U.S.
Air Force, takes her under his wing. They fall in love, she takes him back to the Soviet Union, and then they escape back to the freedom of America.
“That is without doubt one of the worst films I ever made,” said 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 131
WAYNE’S CRUSADE FOR FREEDOM
131
Wayne. “The script was too silly to get the message across, and to make things worse, the director Josef von Sternberg insisted on making us rehearse over and over, and he kept making remarks which I didn’t take kindly to. I’d take them from Pappy, but not from him. I was ready to punch the son of a bitch in the mouth, but Janet kept calming me down.
“As for Hughes, he was obsessed with filming hours and hours of jets flying, and he spent the next eight years doing that. That’s why the film didn’t get a release until 1957. The final budget was something like four million. It was just too stupid for words.”
As much as Wayne liked Howard Hughes, he realized that filmmaking was not Hughes’s greatest talent. By 1950, Wayne had learned just about all there was to know about films, and he looked forward to producing and directing his long-cherished dream, The Alamo. After he completed his work on Jet Pilot, Duke took Chata to Central America where, apart from getting into constant arguments with his wife, he was making a tentative search for possible locations to shoot The Alamo.
There had been a time when Wayne had to feel continually grateful to John Ford, but in 1950 Ford had to be grateful to Wayne. Ford had a pet project called The Quiet Man which he was developing.
Wayne went to Herbert Yates and persuaded him that allowing the great John Ford to make The Quiet Man at Republic would add much prestige to the studio. Ford wanted to make The Quiet Man in color, and on location in Ireland, which would prove expensive. Yates agreed on the condition that Ford first make a film along the lines of Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. So Ford came up with Rio Grande, a relative quickie shot in black and white to save costs, in the summer of 1950 in Moab, Utah.
For the first time Wayne was paired with Maureen O’Hara but the usual company was in evidence, such as Harry Carey Jr., Victor McLaglen, Ben Johnson, and Grant Withers. There was also Ken Curtis, a singer who had become a star of B Westerns of the 1940s.
“Ford liked having songs in his films,” said