FORD VERSUS MCCARTHY
John Ford’s political orientation has also long been a puzzle. Like Duke, he’s easily perceived as a right-wing ultra-patriot, especially given his love of American history, his belief in Manifest Destiny, and his many war films. But such a view fails to explain his attraction to material like The Grapes of Wrath—a film denounced as socialist by some of his peers—in which government plays a crucial role in offsetting the brutalities of the marketplace. Then there’s the pro-labor message of How Green Was My Valley, in which the owners of the coal mine lack all human sympathy and the miners’ only hope for survival is to unionize, though at great cost. Although he was the second director to come onto the production, it was a highly personal film for Ford. The central character of Huw, the boy who narrates the story and who was played by a young Roddy McDowall, channeled much of Ford’s own childhood. Like Jack Ford, Huw is the cosseted youngest boy in a large family of hearty brothers; he spends a year convalescing from childhood tuberculosis by reading the great adventure novels, falling in love with books and storytelling. And the Welsh mining family was reminiscent of Ford’s own Irish immigrant roots: the physical similarity between Sara Allgood, who played the family matriarch, and Ford’s own mother, Barbara Feeney, is uncanny, and Donald Crisp’s performance strongly evokes Ford’s father, John Feeney. When Crisp, the Welsh patriarch, sings an Irish drinking song at his daughter’s ill-fated wedding, the scriptwriter, Philip Dunne, wanted the song to be Welsh, not Irish. “Ah, go on!” the director reportedly scoffed. “The Welsh are just another lot of micks and biddies, only Protestants!”
And consider that satiric moment in Stagecoach, when Gatewood, the dishonest banker absconding with funds played by a blustery Berton Churchill, puts forth a credo that is still a familiar Republican lament:
I pay taxes to the government, and what do we get? Not even protections from the army! I don’t know what the government is coming to! Instead of protecting businessmen, it pokes its nose into business. Why, they’re even talking about having bank examiners, as if we bankers didn’t know how to run our own banks!…America for Americans! The government must not interfere with business. Reduce taxes! Our national debt is something shocking….What this country needs is a businessman for president!
That those fulminating words issue from the mouth of a pompous thief tells you where Ford’s affinities most likely lay—at least in 1939. To Ford, a yearning for the freedom of wide-open spaces—whether Mexico or Monument Valley or aboard the Araner—did not mean a narrowly defined conservatism in which government was the enemy of freedom. If one can be a libertarian and a Democrat, it seems that John Ford, in roughly the first half of his career, was just that. Though Ford lurched rightward after World War II and opposed Communist expansion, he didn’t share the extreme anti-Communist views of Duke Wayne and Ward Bond.
Ford famously stood up to McCarthyism, along with director Joseph Mankiewicz, at a meeting of the Directors Guild of America on October 15, 1950, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Mankiewicz was then the guild’s president, but while he was out of the country, the ultraconservative mogul Cecil B. DeMille had introduced a loyalty oath that he and his cohorts wanted to require of all guild members. DeMille accused the liberal-leaning Mankiewicz of being a Communist sympathizer, and he and his cohorts campaigned to have Mankiewicz removed as guild president. The meeting on October 15 was something of a showdown. Mankiewicz railed against the proposed mandatory loyalty oath and the Hollywood blacklist, which was already destroying careers in Hollywood and had support from John Wayne, Ward Bond, and Ronald Reagan. DeMille accused Mankiewicz’s supporters of subversion, implying that they were in the pocket of anti-American organizations and were “foreign-born” (“Jewish”), which automatically made them suspect in certain quarters of post–World War II America.
Ford sat on the sidelines throughout the heated discussion, until he finally rose, lit his pipe, and identified himself to the meeting’s stenographer. “I’m John Ford,” he said, with oft-quoted terseness. “I make Westerns.” He looked at Cecil B. DeMille and delivered the following left-handed compliment:
I don’t think there is anyone in this room who knows more about what the American public wants than Cecil B. DeMille—and he certainly knows how to give it to them. In that respect I admire him.
He followed that up with this:
But I don’t like you, C.B. I don’t like what you stand for, and I don’t like what you’ve been saying here tonight. Joe [Mankiewicz] has been vilified, and I think he needs an apology….I believe there is only one alternative, and I hereby so move: that Mr. DeMille and the entire board of directors resign and that we give Joe a vote of confidence. And then let’s all go home and get some sleep. We’ve got some pictures to make tomorrow.
The motion was seconded and carried. Ford, and Mankiewicz, had won, though in Ford’s case not out of devotion to liberal politics but out of resentment that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) should be poking its nose into Hollywood’s affairs and ruining screenwriters’ reputations and livelihoods. After being restored by Columbia Pictures in 1962, one such disgraced writer, Marguerite Roberts, would go on to write True Grit.
BIG JIM MCLAIN
While Ford’s political conservatism was threaded with genuine sympathy for the struggles of the laboring class, not so Duke’s, which sprang from distrust, even hatred, of anything that smelled like Communism (his bosom buddy Ward Bond felt similarly and was even more vehemently right-wing than Wayne). Before World War II, Duke had considered himself an independent with a liberal bent, and he’d even voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt. But after the war, his politics lurched dramatically rightward. In 1952, Duke followed up his role in the sublimely satisfying The Quiet Man with the polemical Big Jim McLain; it was his first time out as a producer, a role he shared with Robert Fellows, a Ford acolyte. Wayne had served as producer for his movies for Republic Pictures, but now with his new production company he had the freedom to choose the stories he wanted to tell and how to tell them. This first effort amounted to little more than a work of propaganda in which Duke appeared alongside his doppelgänger, a young James Arness. The movie gives full-throated support to McCarthyism and warns against the rising tide of Communism.
Wayne plays an operative for the government sent to Hawaii to expose a Communist spy ring and haul the villains in front of HUAC, which is characterized in James Edward Grant’s screenplay as a House committee that is “undaunted by the vicious campaign of slander launched against them,” a reversal of the situation in which so many actors, writers, and intellectuals were slandered and lost lifetime employment—screenwriter Dalton Trumbo being a well-known example—just by being called up in front of the committee. The Communists in Big Jim McLain are mostly bad guys from central casting—blue-collar thugs and oily, vaguely European- or Jewish-looking egghead types, including a hapless economics professor (emblematic of the growing mistrust of academics among conservatives). It’s a slanted and simplistic view of Communist infiltration and a paean to HUAC, the witch hunt with anti-Semitic underpinnings that history would roundly discredit.
James Arness and John Wayne in Big Jim McLain, 1952.
Even in 1952, when it premiered, Big Jim McLain was criticized for being overt propaganda. “One wonders about the future of his country when this sort of tripe passes for Americanism,” as one particularly harsh, but not atypical, review put it. It was a daunting failure for both Duke and his screenwriter, James Grant, who had written a number of films in which John Wayne appeared, beginning with one of Duke’s first productions, Angel and the Badman in 1947, and including Sands of Iwo Jima. Duke felt that Grant wrote the kind of direct dialogue that suited his way of speaking, and the two men would ultimately collaborate on ten films, remaining close friends for the rest of their lives. But Big Jim McLain was an undisputed dud. Though the picture lost money, Duke was convinced that it had helped to reelect Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had spearheaded investigations th
at destroyed careers in Hollywood. Duke had considered McCarthy a friend, saying, “Whether he went overboard or not, he was of value to my country.”
The following year, Duke co-produced with Fellows the more entertaining Hondo, a Western that also found ways to express Duke’s conservative views. In Hondo, Wayne’s title character, a U.S. Cavalry dispatcher who had lived with the Apaches for five years, refuses to feed or make friends with a dog, Sam, that has attached himself to the tough loner because that would interfere with the dog’s inherent freedom. Dogs (and men) run free—or ought to. Hondo is far superior to Big Jim McLain in story, look, content, and artistry. Though this was very much a John Wayne production, he ended up relying on his old mentor when the director, John Farrow, had to leave the production before the picture was completed. John Ford came in to direct the last few scenes, including an Apache attack on a circling wagon train.
This improvement over Wayne’s previous film is not due solely to John Ford’s small contribution. The setting and narrative context are crucial to its success. Wayne is simply more likable and believable in Westerns than in modern-dress pictures. As a middle-aged man, he looks bulky and over-the-hill in civilian clothes. Though he’s as famous for his war pictures—They Were Expendable, Back to Bataan, The Longest Day, Sands of Iwo Jima—as he is for his Westerns, the John Wayne of public imagination has his face framed by the western landscape; a casually knotted neckerchief; a tall hat and boots; a slow, rolling walk with the hint of a swagger; a Winchester rifle held easily in one hand; a commanding presence straddling a horse. And timeless western garb best expresses Duke’s iconic image, giving him the stature of an American tall-tale legend like Pecos Bill, or more to the point Paul Bunyan, given Duke’s epic size and strength. It’s pure Americana, unlike his more realistic portrayals in then-contemporary war films.
THE MENTOR
In Hondo, Duke portrays a much more likable character than Jim McLain, in a more compelling story, in part because he is able to present the villains of the piece—a party of renegade Apaches led by a fierce warrior—in a more balanced, realistic, and nuanced way. Falling in love with a prairie wife, Angie Lowe, played by the great stage actress Geraldine Page in her film debut, also goes a long way toward humanizing Hondo. Angie has been abandoned by her feckless husband, so Hondo looks out for her young son, Johnny, played by Lee Aaker. He teaches the boy to fish, tells him the proper names of the trout he catches, instructs him in gun safety, and orders him to be wary of Sam, Hondo’s half-wild, self-sustaining dog. When he discovers that the boy cannot swim, Hondo throws him in a river stream and tells him to grab handfuls of water until he reaches the other side—an example of the kind of “tough love” that Wayne would come to embody.
John Wayne with the brilliant Geraldine Page in Hondo, 1953.
The instruction of a boy in the ways of men is a larger theme of Hondo; when Vittorio, the chief of the marauding Apaches played by Michael Pate, discovers that Johnny’s father has abandoned the family, he insists that Angie take an Apache husband so her son can be instructed in the ways of an Apache brave. Later, when he captures Hondo and is about to kill him, he only spares his life because he mistakes Hondo for Johnny’s father.
It’s this role as a teacher and protector of youth that completes the image of Duke as the quintessential American male. One can speculate that Ford saw that mentoring capacity in him, and given his own sentimental view of family life, he found ways to use it, notably in 3 Godfathers and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The irony, of course, is that Pappy Ford was often a cruel father and a neglectful husband who almost always preferred the company of men over time spent with his family. Though his letters show genuine affection for his wife, and he did share a bond with his daughter, Barbara (who became an alcoholic like her father), he was known to be harsh and belittling toward his only son, Patrick, ultimately disowning him. Duke, on the other hand, forged especially close and supportive relationships with his children from two different marriages.
Mentors are rare in cinematic action and Western heroes. They don’t appear in the films of Gary Cooper and seldom in Clint Eastwood’s. Non-Western action heroes like Errol Flynn, Stewart Granger, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are more likely to have buddies than boys (or girls!) who need mentoring and guidance. A notable exception is the protective relationship between Léon, played by Jean Reno, and twelve-year-old Mathilda, played by a young Natalie Portman in her screen debut, in The Professional. When the tough man of action is also a nurturer, it’s a winning combination and would be more fully explored in three of Duke’s last films: The Cowboys, True Grit, and The Shootist.
6
Lost Battles
That picture lost so much money I can’t buy a pack of chewing gum in Texas without a co-signer.
—JOHN WAYNE
Well, Wayne was the central character, the motivator of the whole thing.
—JOHN FORD
REMEMBER THE ALAMO?
Duke Wayne’s 1960 epic movie depicting the heroic fight for a Republic of Texas wrested from Mexico was a full-voiced celebration of American patriotism—and it nearly ruined him. It also marked a shift in his adoring relationship with John Ford. It would establish Duke’s independence from the tough old taskmaster; by 1960, he was referring to Ford no longer as Coach or Pappy but as the Old Man.
In 1949, Duke had formed the production company Batjac (named after a trading company in the 1948 picture Wake of the Red Witch) to produce Big Jim McLain and Hondo. Duke planned to make a film celebrating the heroic but disastrous loss of the Alamo Mission in 1836 after a thirteen-day siege by the Mexican army. He’d begun serious work on the project in 1946, consulting with Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie. From Ford he’d no doubt learned that America’s spirit resided in its folktales and legends. He saw the “Texians” and their fellow defenders’ brave fight against Mexican president General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s vastly superior army—roughly fifteen hundred troops against barely a hundred rebels and a handful of late recruits—as an echo of America’s rebellion against the British. Duke hoped his movie would serve as a reminder that America had often fought valiantly to preserve its freedom, but he overlooked the fact that the struggle accelerating in Vietnam was not a struggle for American independence, nor could it be framed as a moral imperative, like World Wars I and II, with world peace and stability imperiled. In the mind of superpatriot John Wayne, whenever and wherever America fought, it was a just fight for American values, regardless of circumstances.
Duke had begun scouting locations for The Alamo early, while he was still under contract to Republic Pictures. He hoped to use land just outside Panama City, but Republic’s chief, Herb Yates, began to chafe at the anticipated high costs of production. His reluctance encouraged Duke to break with the studio and strike out on his own; not only would he produce the film, but he decided he would direct it as well.
Ford was against it.
Of course he knew what awaited Duke in his directorial debut; this was going to be not a small, personal movie but an epic film with choreographed battle scenes, two thousand extras, and fourteen hundred horses. Neither Ford nor Fellows thought Duke could pull it off. Perhaps Ford’s competitive spirit made him ambivalent about his protégé succeeding in the directorial arena. He had helped shape Duke into a powerful screen presence and the most successful box office draw in the world for several consecutive years; that wasn’t enough for his onetime third property boy?
Between various other acting projects, Duke continued to search for an ideal place to film The Alamo. He moved his sights from Panama to Mexico, but in 1956 he met a Texas rancher and contractor named James T. “Happy” Shahan. Shahan convinced Duke that he had to film his movie on location in Texas, offering up his own vast acreage just north of Brackettville, a small dusty town near the Mexican border. Shahan’s twenty-thousand-acre ranch was the perfect setting, but the cost of building a set proved astronomical. Duke h
ired hundreds of Mexican laborers to build a replica of the Alamo Mission and old San Antonio as they appeared in the nineteenth century under Mexican rule. Construction ran to $1.5 million, jeopardizing the movie’s budget before filming even began. Wells were dug and electric cables installed. Then there were the fourteen hundred horses and saddles that were needed, along with buckboards, cannons, and set interiors. Duke housed his cast and crew of 350 at nearby Fort Clark’s barracks, and when that wasn’t enough, he rented thirty-eight motel rooms. The pressure was enormous, and he began smoking nearly a hundred cigarettes a day. He found himself exploding in fury under the pressure, not unlike his mentor, John Ford. “He ate, slept, and dreamed that picture,” Patrick Wayne recalled.
Duke began courting Texas millionaires to cover the skyrocketing costs and, beyond that, hocking his life to finance his movie. He mortgaged his automobiles and his home in Encino as well as a condominium he owned in New York. If this movie didn’t recoup its expenses, John Wayne would be ruined.
Following Ford’s example, Duke relied on many of his family members to take on crucial roles for The Alamo: besides little Aissa, Duke’s brother, Bob, worked as a producer’s aid; Duke’s son Michael was an assistant producer; his son Patrick was given a small role in the movie; and his daughter Toni from his first marriage had a part in the film as well. His wife, Pilar, who seemed to have abandoned any ambition for a serious theatrical career after marrying Duke, accepted a role as an extra.
Wayne and Ford Page 14
