American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  As it turned out, Clift was more than just a brilliant casting coup on Hawks’s part. He represented the passing of a generational torch, from the actors of Wayne’s generation, who learned their craft on the job, who grew up with the industry from the days of silent films, to the new youth-oriented crop of actors weaned on “the Method.” Clift was the first of a trio of young men who would, in the ’50s, redefine what screen acting was—Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean. This great acting transformation begins in Hawks’s Red River.

  Tom Dunson is an aging Texas cattle baron after the end of the Civil War; in order to survive in business, he decides to move his herd over the Chisholm Trail, beyond the Red River into Missouri, where the railroads can transport his cattle west. The journey is fraught with obstacles—the elements, Comanches, and dissension among the hired hands, led by Cherry Valance, who, finding Dunson’s leadership too harsh, threatens to lead a revolt. Matt, Dunson’s grown-up foster son, stops it, and takes over the drive himself. He also finds love along the way when he helps rescue Tess Millay’s wagon train from a Comanche attack. (Broadway actress Joanne Dru replaced Hawks’s first choice for the role, Maggie Sheridan, when she became pregnant before filming began. A year after the film’s completion, Dru married John Ireland. The marriage lasted eight years.)85 Tess’s talky presence later on in the film ignites a Freudian rivalry between Dunson and Garth. Tess is a typical Hawks woman, rough, tough, and not just able to run with the boys but also to fire a rifle with the best of them.

  During production, Clift grew into his character, to the point where during the climactic fight, he looked quite believable against Wayne, not because of Hawks’s off-screen fighting lessons but because both men played their characters so well; Dunson is older and wearier than Garth, and his surrogate son is filled with a rage of his own. It is to Hawks’s credit that he could tie together all the complex psychological ends of the film into one immensely entertaining picture, one of the gems of 1948. It is also one of the most liberal films of its time, with Dunson the dictator brought down by his brave, rebellious, and ultimately heroic foster son, Matthew Garth, the proto workingman’s hero.

  Red River was shot on location in seventy-six days in Elgin Rain Valley, Arizona, with the additional scenes filmed after the completion of Fort Apache, in the Goldwyn studios in Hollywood. To make these scenes match the earlier locations, twenty tons of sand and mesquite were imported from Arizona. Wayne received $165,000 and 10 percent of the net profits to appear in the film, renegotiated by Feldman from his original $125,000 because of the film’s extended production time, which caused Wayne to leave the film before it was finished, to work on Fort Apache.86

  When Hawks ran into some editing problems, he called Ford and asked him for help. Ford graciously agreed and convinced Hawks to eliminate some of the dialogue sequences that slowed the action and have Walter Brennan narrate them instead. It cut nearly eight minutes of film and increased its pacing. Ford’s influence extended into the actual shooting, as Hawks consciously tried to emulate the vistas that made Ford’s pictures so visually beautiful. Hawks: “I made a very good burial scene [in Red River] . . . I saw a cloud coming and I knew it was going to pass over the hill behind and I said to Wayne, ‘Now get ready and no matter whether you make a muff, just keep on going, we can dub it in easy.’ And he did, and he went on with some other things and he said, ‘What was happening?’ I said, ‘The cloud went right over as you were reading this thing—that made it very good.’ Ford fills his pictures with stuff like that.”87

  One of the most curious prerelease moments happened when Howard Hughes, of all people, saw a screening and objected to the use of “Draw your gun,” a line of dialogue in the film. Hughes then insisted that the end of Red River had been wholly lifted from his 1943 The Outlaw’s quirky retelling of the saga of Billy the Kid, as seen through the point of view of Jane Russell’s chest. In that film, there is a sequence near the end in which, according to Hedda Hopper, “Billy the Kid resists the efforts of his erstwhile friend Doc to draw him into a duel. Billy refuses to go for his guns even though Doc shoots a few rounds in his ears. The two are reconciled during the film.” Hawks couldn’t believe it, but the lawsuit threatened to hold up the film’s already long-delayed release, so, despite his insistence the line be left in the film, he finally agreed to delete it.

  That still didn’t satisfy Hughes, who insisted on suing Hawks for copyright infringement and went to court, where it appeared he was going to win, until Gradwell Sears and Edward Small, two executives from United Artists, agreed to give Hughes the right to edit out the entire scene. An exasperated Hawks went to Wayne and asked him to intervene with his friend. Wayne then met with Hughes and asked him to please leave the scene in, saying it meant a lot to him personally. The perverse billionaire then smiled and asked Wayne why it took him so long. Wayne laughed, as did Hughes, who then dropped his lawsuit, and the scene was left in the film.

  Red River opened September 30, 1948, six months after Fort Apache, and of the two films, it was Red River that proved the career turning point for Wayne. Even with Clift’s impressive debut, the film belongs to Wayne, who gives not just a bravura performance, but the best of his career to date. In the midst of his increasing polarizing political activities, an unstable second marriage, financial problems, and a postwar Hollywood increasingly populated with bunch of newer and younger angst-filled actors, like Clift, Wayne was able to rise above it all to deliver a performance that was at once physically coarse and emotionally strong.

  The reviews rightly hailed both the film and Wayne’s soaring performance in it. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it a film with a “solidly masculine cast, topped off by a withering job of acting a boss-wrangler done by Mr. Wayne. This consistently able portrayer of two-fisted, two-gunned outdoor men surpasses himself in this picture . . . on the way to becoming one of the best cowboy pictures ever made . . . sixteen hands above the level of routine horse opera these days.” Time magazine called it “[a] rattling good outdoor adventure movie” and singled out Wayne’s performance: “Wayne’s consistently able portrayal of a two-fisted, two-gunned outdoor man surpasses himself in this picture . . .” that would “take its place among the other big, box-office important western epics that have come from Hollywood over the years . . . a spectacle of sweeping Grandeur.” And from Variety came this: “[a] film which is spectacle at its best although spectacle is by no means all of it . . . it is epic in its sweep and size of its canvas but the canvas is packed with hard-bitten detail rather than romantic flourishes.” Later on, Andrew Sarris, in the New York Film Bulletin wrote, “What is most impressive about Red River is Hawks’ concentration on character relationships and the swirling dust of horses and cattle.”

  The film still impresses today. Andy Webster, writing about a 2013 Hawks revival, wrote that “Wayne plays Tom Dunson, an obsessed boss placing unreasonable demands on his crew, including his compassionate but defiant surrogate son, [played by] Montgomery Clift, every inch a star in his screen debut . . . Wayne may play a domineering father figure, but in conceding the spotlight to the ascendant Clift, he displays perhaps the highest virtue of all: humility.”

  But it was John Ford’s “critique” that meant the most to Wayne. After seeing the complete version in a screening room, Ford turned to Hawks and said, “I never knew the big son-of-a-bitch could act!”88

  Chapter 14

  After his double Academy snub for Fort Apache and Red River, Wayne was convinced the Communist members of the Academy would fight to prevent him from ever winning. It was following the Awards ceremony in 1949 that Wayne decided to accept the presidency of the MPA.

  Charles Feldman then sent him the script to All the King’s Men, loosely based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel of the same name that focused on the political career of Huey Long, the demagogic, charismatic governor and then senator of Louisiana who had his eyes on a run for the White House before he was assassinated in 1935. Wayne told Feldman he coul
d take the script and “shove it up [director] Robert Rossen’s ass.” He believed that the producer/writer/director was trying to make a film to illustrate the failings of the democratic system. Wayne never regretted his decision to turn down the role, even though it went to Broderick Crawford and he won an Oscar for his performance, and the film (Rossen and Columbia Pictures) Best Picture. Wayne was so enraged by the script he wrote a letter to the MPA excoriating Rossen for trying to destroy the fabric of American life. A year later, Rossen was called before HUAC and his career in Hollywood was shut down for more than a decade.

  After rejecting All the King’s Men, Wayne also passed on Henry King’s The Gunfighter (he had wanted to play the role of the aging gunfighter but the film was being made at Columbia, and he still held a grudge against Harry Cohn). Columbia then sold the project to Twentieth Century–Fox, where Gregory Peck eventually got the role. Wayne also said no Michael Curtiz’s The Breaking Point. The starring role in that went to John Garfield, his penultimate film before being blacklisted. Wayne also turned down White Native, a jungle script for RKO that eventually went to Johnny Weissmuller but was never made. John Ford and Merian Cooper then offered Wayne one of the three starring roles in 3 Godfathers, which, of course he accepted.89

  McBride posits that Ford sensed which way the political wind in Hollywood was blowing and wanted to make an unabashedly pro-Christian movie (even more so than his others) that in no way disrespected the birth of Christ. 3 Godfathers is a John Wayne western-style parable (rather than a true western) of the story of the Three Wise Men and the birth of baby Jesus. It is one of the most overlooked films in Ford’s canon. (Andrew Sarris barely mentions it in his Ford book and marks it as one of Ford’s lesser achievements in The American Cinema. Bogdanovich also neglects it; McBride pays scant more attention to it.)

  Even though they hadn’t worked together for years, and their relationship never recovered from their professional and personal schism, Ford dedicated 3 Godfathers on-screen “To the memory of Harry Carey—bright star of the western sky.” Carey’s son, Harry Carey Jr., making his first appearance in a John Ford film (after his “debut” in Red River), played one of the three godfathers, all bank robbers, Wayne and Pedro Armendáriz the other two. Ward Bond played the marshal looking for the three bank robbers. Running from him, they come across an expectant mother in a covered wagon in the desert, dying of thirst. They deliver the baby, a girl, and the mother’s dying wish is that they care for her. They are deeply moved by this, find religion so to speak, and take the baby to New Jerusalem, Arizona. It is the hokiest, rather than the holiest of Ford films, perhaps rightly neglected by his best critics. If it served any purpose other than “remembering” Harry Carey, it reaffirmed Ford’s moral standing among the political commandants of Hollywood. It also reaffirmed Wayne’s Christian ethics after his divorce. Filmed in Death Valley in thirty-two days, between the end of May and the middle of June, with interiors shot at RKO-Pathé in Culver City, 3 Godfathers opened December 1, 1948, in time to catch the Christmas crowd. Critics were generally kind to both the film and Wayne. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote, “It is Mr. Ford’s wonderful style in picturing a frontier fable that has the classic mold. John Wayne . . . is wonderfully raw and ructious . . . There are humor and honest tear-jerking in this visually beautiful film.” Audiences loved it as well. Made on a budget of $1.2 million, it doubled that in its initial domestic release and added another $750,00 in foreign. Wayne earned $207,000 from his salary and percentage of the profits (Bond was paid a straight $2,500 a week, Harry Carey Jr., $350 a week).

  That same year Wayne had also agreed to make Wake of the Red Witch for Republic, a sunken-treasure melodrama based on a forgotten bestseller by Garland Roark. It was directed by Edward Ludwig and bore more than a passing resemblance to Reap the Wild Wind, reteaming Wayne with his costar from Angel and the Badman, Gail Russell.90 The film, told in a series of flashbacks-within-flashbacks, was written by Harry Brown and Kenneth Gamet and filmed at Republic Studios and on location in Arcadia, California.

  According to Dave Kehr, an astute film critic writing in the New York Times, “Red Witch is a film that courts the ridiculous, with its potted-palm islands populated by ethnographically unlikely natives . . . but the film finds something dreamlike and beautiful in all this artifice, largely by refusing any overtly poetic efforts and allowing the slow rhythms and circular patterns of the narrative to reveal the unexpected scale of the characters’ emotions . . . Wake [along with Red River, helped] reveal a new, middle-aged gravity in Wayne and a dormant ability to play distant, troubled men . . . an eccentric, haunting work that made a contribution to Wayne’s transformation, but which traffics in elements of gothic fantasy and lyricism not often associated with Wayne’s personality.”

  Made for $1.2 million, Red Witch grossed $2.8 million in its initial domestic release, a tribute to Wayne’s popularity. The best sequence is his battle against a rubber octopus that took six puppeteers to control. For the film, Wayne earned $283,000, Gail Russell $35,000, and Luther Adler, who played the villain, $10,000.

  IT HAD BEEN A BUSY period for Wayne. As Gladwin Hill noted that year in the New York Times, “Even the home-bound little-old-lady-in-Pasadena . . . can hardly peek out the door these days without coming into figurative combat with that amiable, shambling, six-foot-five pillar of the Hollywood community Marion Michael Morrison, alias, John Wayne, alias ‘Duke.’ ” Hill then quoted Ford’s reply as to the reason for Wayne’s popularity. “ ‘He’s the best actor in Hollywood, that’s all.’ ”

  Certainly one of the most popular. In March 1949, the influential poll of exhibitors that appeared annually in the Motion Picture Herald had Wayne in fourth place, up from thirty-three the year before (behind Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Abbott and Costello).91 The honor was announced by Louella Parsons on her ABC radio program. She had reconciled her differences with Wayne when he became the president of the MPA.

  By the fall, it was possible to choose from eight John Wayne pictures playing at the same time new or in rerelease in various theaters in Los Angeles, a time when Hollywood’s output was at an all-time low, due to its political infighting and the new popularity of television. Playing at the same time were Red River, Stagecoach, 3 Godfathers, The Long Voyage Home, Wake of the Red Witch, Fort Apache, The Spoilers, Seven Sinners, Pittsburgh, I Cover the War, The Sea Spoilers, Fighting Seabees, and Flying Tigers.

  He was also on TV every day on Frontier Playhouse or Six-Gun Cinema, a syndicated series of replays of some his old B movies. A spokesman for Frontier Playhouse said at the time, “We regard our Hopalong Cassidy, Tim McCoy and John Wayne westerns as our quality shows. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that only kids watch them. Our surveys show that while fathers and mothers may say they’re just looking at them to keep the children company, they outnumber the juveniles in our audiences, sixty-two percent to thirty-eight percent.”

  According to one publication, the reason for his surge in popularity was that he “carries dynamite in his large fists. This, and the charm in his crinkly eyes, gives him tremendous pull at the box-office all over the country. His drawing power is especially potent in the small towns, where any John Wayne picture, whether it is new or 10 years old, will pack the house . . . working with a steady, unnervous strength for four different studios—Republic, RKO, Argosy [John Ford] and Warner Bros—he shifts back and forth between Westerns, sea-epics, and war pictures . . . one female fan summed up his appeal for women this way: ‘He doesn’t look like an actor—he looks like a real man.’ ”

  Because of this newly elevated popularity, in April 1949, one month after his ascendacy in the popularity polls and his election as president of the MPA, Wayne was offered and signed a precedent-setting deal with Warner Bros to do one picture a year for the studio for seven years, in return for 10 percent of the gross when and if any of them were reissued. No other actor had ever received this type of residual deal, and it initiated a long fight between the studios
and the guilds over the question of reissues. Wayne had insisted on including it because so many of his films were being perpetually rereleased, with no additional pay for him. Wayne justified his position as an unselfish move: “I’m looking for some security for my kids. Don’t forget I didn’t start making big money until the era of high taxes. Right now, I get to keep six cents out of every dollar I make. That’s why I have to get the residual rights of some of my pictures so the money will keep coming in.” The Screen Actors Guild was against reissues without repayment as well, because it claimed it kept members from making new pictures while getting nothing for the ones they already made.

  How did he get the deal? There is no question he was hot, at the top of his game, and that his pictures, good or bad, were making money. But there was something else. Simply put, popularity meant power in Hollywood. No studio wanted to come up against Wayne over the question of residuals. His strong anti-Communist stance and his new position as the head of the MPA was a strong one-two punch. And yet, as much as he fought for the additional money, he also worried that all this exposure would make audiences tire of him and lower the demand for new John Wayne movies, reducing his price. “That finishes me,” Wayne told Ward Bond one night not long after, over drinks at the Formosa, a small Polynesian-style bar across from Warner’s Hollywood studios. “No actor can have that many pictures showing at one time and not be finished.”

  When asked by the press how he felt about all the exposure he was getting that year, Wayne again expressed his concern over making too many movies: “I think four [pictures] a year, which due to delays probably means about three and a half, is about right. I don’t want to saturate the market with my pictures, and I hope it doesn’t turn out that the reissues have done so. I’ve got three [unmade] pictures coming up—She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [Ford/Argosy], The Sands of Iwo Jima [Republic] and The Fighting Kentuckian [Republic]—and if they don’t go aground on the rock of too much Wayne, I suggest a case will have been made for the saturation-booking idea.”