A Republican at Republic

The image of Wayne as the ultimate American fighting for right grew up during World War II when he played the war-hero in Republic's Flying Tigers (1942) and The Fighting Seabees (1944), and in the wake of Hiroshima when American military might was most in need of justification. In Back to Bataan, They Were Expendable (both 1945), the fiercely jongoistic The Sands of Two Jima (1949), and John Ford's cavalry triology - Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) - he played war leaders who were tough, courageous, compassionate and American. Meanwhile, back at the Hollywood front Wayne, a staunch Republican and President of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, was taking an active part in running Communists out of the film capital - and colleagues out of their livelihood.

lawless range
(1935)

The films that also involved Wayne on the production side are those which most cohesively unite his movie and public images. Big Jim McLain (1952), which he co-produced, is pro-McCarthyist propaganda with Wayne as a tough HUAC investigator pursuing 'pinkos'; in The Alamo (1960), his first film as a director, he played Davy Crockett defending Texas against Santa Anna's Mexican army - a martyr for American frredom; The Green Berets (1968) was his second stab at direction and is a vituperative pro-Vietnam War film in which he plays a mercenary routing the Vietcong. As 'pro-American' propaganda this is strong, sometimes unpalatable stuff, and he even recorded an LP called Why I Love America with Robert Mitchum. Now there is a hint of bathos in that title, as there is in the whole of Wayne's over-inflated image as the last American hero, and it would be feasible to suggest that Wayne was aware of it. His Republicanism and anti-Communism (he had read widely in Communist literature and in political science) were sincere, and he was a fervent supporter of Eisenhower, Goldwater and Nixon, but perhaps he knew too the power of talismen, bronze medals and movie images in the art of propaganda. Yet, strange as it may seem, in his greatest films Wayne's characters are not all that America would have them be.

the alamo
(1960)

South of the border . . .

If Wayne was and is a symbol of Americanism then, politically and socially, no other actor has done so much to undermine the self- righteous bluster of WASPish - White Anglo- Saxon Protestant - redneck values, both by espousing them and showing the neuroses nagging away at them. Wayne married three Spanish-Americans during his lifetime (so much for The Alamo) and eventually turned to Catholicism on his death-bed. If Ford, Hawks and the directors at Republic hadn't grabbed him for Westerns and war films in the late Forties and early Fifties, he might have been an effective star of film noir, so thoroughly ambiguous and troubled is his image when scrutinized. In fact Ford's The Searchers (1956) is a Western film noir with Wayne as a psychopath trapped in the alternatively light and dark landscape of his own mind. Even if Wayne was politically naive then surely he understood the dreadful frailty of his bloated, brow-beating characters and that the anger, insensitivity and spitefulness of Tom Dunson in Red River (1948), Sergeant Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima and Tom Domphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) showed the bully and the tyrant in the hero who defends his flag at all costs. These characters are tired, unhappy men, soured and warped by their own experiences and plunged into crises of conscience which they can only solve by blasting their way out.

red river
(1948)

For all their self-sufficiency and arrogant confidence Wayne's movie characters - his American heroes - are lonely, sulky, ill-tempered and desperate. In good moods they tend to be bluff and patronizing - Wayne's grin is cracked; his eyes narrowed under his brow with suspicion. In bad moments they are monstrous; recall the incident in Red River when Dunson bounds across the trail, draws and shoots the cocky gunslinger without stopping his relentless march and lays into his young foster-son Matt (Montgomery Clift), a fury of flailing fists and mad temper. 'I never knew that big sonofabitch could act,' Ford said to Hawks after seeing Red River. As old men or neurotics Wayne was especially effective and knew exactly what he was about, as did Ford - his patron and mentor - and in The Searchers, The Horse Soldiers (1959), a wearied view of the Civil War, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, they share the knowledge that the American Dream has become an American nightmare.

the man who shot liberty valance
(1962)

No Janet for John

On other levels Wayne's characters are equally ill at ease. It is significant that in many of his films he is essentially womanless. In Red River he leaves his girl behind (intending to return) but she is killed by Indians; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon finds him as a mawkishly sentimental widower who confides in his wife's grave; in Rio Grande he is estranged from his wife becvause he burnt down her home in the Civil War; in The Searchers the woman he loves is married to his brother; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance sees him lose his girl to the man who also usurps his heroism. The Wayne persona inevitably engenders sexual disharmony. For such an American hero Wayne frequently cut an impotent, asexual figure - so colossal that he swamps mere masculinity. He was certainly no Gable - after all, how many women find the Duke attractive? - and this is surely not the way the American male likes to view himself.

the searchers
(1956)

Of course there is an escape clause, for Wayne is seldom just a tyrant. After Dunson and Matt have fought themselves into the ground in Red River, Tess Millay (Joanne Dru) comes up to them: 'Whoever would have thought that you two could have killed each other?' she chides, and the loving father-son relationship is re-established. 'Come on Debbie, let's go home,' Ethan (Wayne) says to his niece instead of killing her as he had set out to do in The Searchers, and it was Jean-Luc Godard who pinpointed the secret of Wayne's appeal when he wrote:

'How can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?'