This Day in Film History (Death of Ward Bond, Prolific Character Actor and Wayne Sidekick)

Nov. 5, 1960—Ward Bond, an actor with more than 200 credits on the big and small screen—including his starring role on the long-running TV western Wagon Train—died of a heart attack in Dallas.

Most likely, you have seen this busy character actor with the gruff voice and everyman persona in at least two films during the course of a year: on March 17, as a fishing- and boxing-loving priest in The Quiet Man; and, at Christmastime, in It’s a Wonderful Life, as James Stewart’s small-town cop friend Bert. 

In all, he appeared in 13 movies nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (though he himself was never cited).

It is doubtful that Bond, when he heeded a recruiting plea by USC football teammate John Wayne to serve as an extra in the 1928 John Ford film Salute, expected to enjoy a three-decade Hollywood career.

Bond made 23 movies with Wayne and at least that many with Ford, and offscreen the trio would form a boisterous friendship marked by hijinks and epic drinking bouts, often on the director’s yacht. Ford even had Bond play his alter ego (a director named "John Dodge") in the 1957 film Wings of Eagles.

Despite their friendship, the cantankerous Ford gave Bond (and Wayne) endless grief while filming. At one point, during location shooting of The Searchers, Bond had pulled the plug on a camera in order to use his electric razor, unaware that a scene was being filmed then. 

Knowing the director’s explosive temper and penchant to humiliate cast and crew members for an offense, the cameraman didn’t tell Ford what Bond had done till several years after the actor’s death.

Bond’s collegiate athletic career and continued burly build in adulthood encouraged the illusion of a vigorous physical health that he did not possess. He was disqualified from serving in World War II because of epilepsy and suffered from high blood pressure during the four seasons he spent on Wagon Train.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who questioned Bond’s professionalism or work ethic. But he was not universally beloved in the industry, particularly after he co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. 

In the postwar period, this organization became one of the most virulent forces behind the blacklists maintained to stamp out communist or even merely progressive views in Hollywood.

This right-wing activism turned off many Hollywood liberals so that, ironically, Bond found himself underemployed in any films that did not involve Wayne and Ford. 

It wasn’t until he secured the role of western scout Major Seth Adams on Wagon Train that Bond could reach something like his former presence on the screen. But at that point, his presence loomed larger than ever in Hollywood, as the NBC series placed #2 in the Nielsen ratings from its second through fourth seasons.

It came as a surprise in the industry, then, when Bond had his fatal heart attack. Wayne delivered the eulogy for his longtime friend, and, he observed not long before he died, he would think of what roles his friend and extremely versatile character actor might have played had he lived longer.

Quote of the Day (Charles Portis, on a Most Unlikely Western Hero)

“He stirred as I came through the curtain. His weight was such that the bunk bowed in the middle almost to the floor. It looked like he was in a hammock….The brindle cat Sterling Price was curled up on the foot of the bed. Rooster [Cogburn] coughed and spit on the floor and rolled a cigarette and lit it and coughed some more. He asked me to bring him some coffee and I got a cup and took the eureka pot from the stove and did this. As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”—American novelist and journalist Charles Portis (1933-2020), True Grit (1968)

It can be pretty fascinating to see how two different actors portray the same character. Both John Wayne and Jeff Bridges kept Deputy U.S. Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn’s character-defining eyepatch. Both the 1969 adaptation of the Portis novel and the Coen brothers’ 2010 version featured this bedroom scene with the cat.

But, while Wayne embodied the character’s considerable heft, Bridges—at least as pictured here—depicted him as grungier. He’s not only got the mustache that Wayne decided not to grow, but a beard.

This Rooster Cogburn is just the kind of “billy goat” that the narrator of the above quote, Mattie Ross, would have recoiled from—if, that is, she wasn’t looking for the toughest U.S. deputy marshal in the district.

Cogburn, having killed more than a few men in the line of duty (all justified, he claims), more than meets her requirements—and then some.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Rio Bravo,’ As Sassy Angie Dickinson Messes With John Wayne’s Head)

Feathers [played by Angie Dickinson, pictured]: “In case you make up your mind, I left my door open. Get a good night's sleep.”

John T. Chance [played by John Wayne]: “You're not helping me any.”—Rio Bravo (1959), screenplay by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett based on a short story by B.H. McCampbell, directed by Howard Hawks

You know Rio Bravo, don’t you? It’s the classic western where The Duke discovers, courtesy of Angie Dickinson, that even a big, tough guy still has a thing or two to learn when it comes to women. Not a bad lesson, especially the morning after Super Bowl Sunday.

Happy Valentine’s Day, folks!

This Day in Film History (Howard Hawks, ‘Great Professional’ of Hollywood Golden Age, Born)

May 30, 1896—Howard Hawks, who developed a reputation as a competent craftsman before being reevaluated as one of Hollywood’s premiere directors toward the end of his five-decade career, was born in Goshen, Ind.

Though associated with a score of Tinseltown’s best-loved, timeless classics, Hawks made little impression on critics for a long time. Holding neither the interests nor the talents of a specialist, he made it difficult to identify what constituted “A Howard Hawks Film,” in the way that some contemporaries made their marks with particular genres or settings, such as Alfred Hitchcock (thrillers), John Ford (westerns, war films, or cinema about Ireland), or Billy Wilder (fast-talking, cynical comedy-dramas).

Instead, Hawks took it as a challenge to create top-flight movies across genres: the gangster film (Scarface), screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby), biopics (Sergeant York), musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), film noir (The Big Sleep), sci-fi (The Thing), widescreen historical epics (Land of the Pharoahs), and westerns (Red River, Rio Bravo). No wonder a 1967 TV summary of his career was entitled, “Howard Hawks: The Great Professional.”

Remarkably, this versatile director was nominated for a competitive Oscar only once in his career, for Sergeant York. (In one of the Academy Awards’ embarrassed annual attempts to honor a film giant before it’s too late, he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement in 1974, only three years before his death.)

Yet, in addition to the French “New Wave” critics-directors who began to reappraise his work as an “auteur” in the 1950s, Hawks also influenced such American filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Brian de Palma, John Carpenter, and Peter Bogdanovich (who signaled his great debt to Hawks in his first two major successes, The Last Picture Show and What's Up, Doc?).

Majoring in mechanical engineering in college, the director was less interested in inventing entirely different methods of moviemaking than in tinkering with a celluloid product until it moved faster and more smoothly.

Even if faced with a script with only the wispiest of plots, he’d sit down on the set, pull out a big yellow legal pad, and scribble down dialogue that made audiences enjoy this scene and forget about the overall lack of a substantial story, recalled Kirk Douglas about a turning point in their 1952 western, The Big Sky.

An even more telling example of this is in the sexually charged encounter between Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe and Dorothy Malone’s Acme Bookshops proprietess in The Big Sleep. The plot of the film is almost preposterously serpentine (even author Raymond Chandler had trouble recalling the killer), but the fencing between the private eye and the bespectacled but seductive bibliophile in this scene remains fondly recalled three-quarters of a century later.

Hawks got his start in film at the technical end during the silent era as a prop man, then parlayed some training in architectural drawing at school to land a job building a set for a Douglas Fairbanks film. Part of the reason why he commanded so much respect on a film set was that he had performed so many functions before finally getting a chance as a director: assistant director, casting director, script supervisor, screenwriter, editor and producer.

While possessing his own ideas on how a scene would work, Hawks was so self-assured that he allowed those he worked with to arrive at the solution themselves. He encouraged actors to improvise (as demonstrated vividly and brilliantly in “Self-Styled Siren” film blogger Farran Smith Nehme’s analysis of Rosalind Russell’s performance in His Girl Friday).

Angie Dickinson, who worked with him on Rio Bravo, related Hawks’ indirect approach in this interview for the Web site “Ain’t It Cool”:

“Hawks was tough, because he would not really tell you what to do. He would just sort of get around to what he was after, because, and I finally analyzed it, if he told you what to do it wouldn’t come from you, so he had to make you, through osmosis, do what he had in mind, but not specifically.”

Henry Adams’ terse description of Theodore Roosevelt may be applied just as easily to Hawks: “he was pure act.” A racing car and airplane aficionado, he reminded listeners that the essence of movies was motion pictures. Unenthusiastic about sending messages through his work, he was equally unpretentious about working well but swiftly and within budget. (On Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion death scenes in The Wild Bunch: “Oh, hell, I can kill and bury ten guys in the time it takes him to kill one.”)

Adept at fashioning rapid dialogue, Hawks was a slow, deliberate talker himself. It forced the listener to hang on his every word, only reinforcing his reputation for gravitas.

John Ford, Hawks’ good friend, bestowed on him the nickname “The Silver Fox,” in simultaneous tribute to his exalted reputation as a ladies’ man and his white hair. Though many of his films reflected his Hemingwayesque appreciation for the skill and sang froid required by male professionals such as airplane flyers, racing-car drivers, soldiers and hunters, they never wasted the opportunity to highlight self-confident, wisecracking women too wise to tolerate nonsense.

Three actresses were especially shaped under his direction:

*Lauren Bacall attracted attention in her film debut, To Have and Have Not, as Hawks reportedly based her cool, brassy, athletic persona—even her onscreen nickname “Slim”—on his wife at the time, Nancy Gross.

*Marilyn Monroe took a major step forward in her career by moving from eye-candy adornment to sexy but vulnerable in Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

*Angie Dickinson enjoyed a career-making performance, after only four years in the business, as the traveling card shark who holds her own against sheriff John Wayne through humor, flirtation, and a steely refusal to be wronged in Rio Bravo. (Do I even have to mention that the actress appears on the right, with the director and The Duke, in the image accompanying this post?)

Even after all his late-career attention, “Hawks remained the least understood among the great American directors,” Bogdanovich wrote in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. “But his films represent one of the most vivid, varied, yet consistent, bodies of work in movies; ironically, too, perhaps the most typically American. Which maybe explains why his pictures don't date as so many do, even the best: he touched some parts of the American psyche that are there forever.”

Flashback, December 1945: ‘They Were Expendable,’ Ford Tribute to Naval Courage, Premieres

They Were Expendable, MGM’s somber, stirring tribute to the American PT-boat sailors who first battled skeptical military brass about their craft, then Japanese invaders in the Philippines in the first desperate days of WWII, opened at Loew’s Capitol Theater in Washington, DC, in December 1945, with an audience including many in the military it honored, such as Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.

Navy personnel also helped create the film, including screenwriter Frank Wead, a retired WWI pilot; director John Ford, a captain in the Navy Photographic Field Unit; and one of the two male leads, Robert Montgomery, a real-life PT skipper in the recently concluded war.

One key cast and crew member, however, was not involved in the war: the second male lead, John Wayne, who nevertheless used the movie to recast his image successfully as a towering American hero.

Ford and Wayne made 20 films over 35 years, but in certain ways this may have been the most pivotal. It certainly was the one that tested the most the boundaries of their working relationship and friendship.

Ford, who had enlisted in the Navy even before Pearl Harbor, had spent much of the prior four years in a documentary crew filming battles, including Midway (where he continued shooting even after being wounded, earning a Purple Heart for his gallantry). Throughout that time, he had been after Wayne to “get into” the fight.

But Wayne—34 and able-bodied at the outbreak of hostilities at Pearl Harbor—kept finding one reason after another not to join up. He had suffered an injury during college that continually hampered his function (though it hadn’t bothered him much while performing his own stunts several years before). He was the sole support of his family (though that status would change, as he was about to enter divorce proceedings). He couldn’t get out of a contract with Republic Pictures without triggering a lawsuit (though he didn’t test to see whether Republic head Herbert J. Yates was bluffing). He wrote Ford about joining his photographic unit but kept postponing joining until after his next picture.

In the end, Wayne was exempted from service due to his age and family status. That didn’t sit well with, for instance, Pacific Theater vets who, upon encountering Wayne on a USO tour, booed him raucously (an incident recalled in William Manchester’s WWII memoir, Goodbye, Darkness).

While not a draft dodger, Wayne had not pressed his case as vigorously as other stars had done. That rankled Ford, who before long was ridiculing him repeatedly in front of the entire crew.

The baiting was in keeping with the longtime on-set behavior of Ford, an alcoholic bully who would often pick one person on each film to abuse. The director had, in prior movies, taken Wayne to task for, among other things, “walking like a pansy.” 

Now, almost as soon as shooting began on Ford’s birthday in February—with co-star Montgomery serving inadvertently as a model of doing one’s military duty—Wayne found himself subjected to abuse on a subject that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the not-so-subtle imputation that he was a "shirker."

Ford may have reached his zenith in sadism when he asked why Wayne couldn’t even salute properly. Watching his co-star reduced to what another actor in the production called “a quivering pulp,” Montgomery had had enough. If Ford was subjecting Wayne to this treatment on his behalf, the director should stop the treatment right now, Montgomery said.

Ford eased up—but only on this movie. More than a decade and a half later, while shooting The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford asked James Stewart, a decorated pilot, what he had done in the war. Then he turned to Wayne to ask what he had done.

One has to ask why Wayne continued to endure this abuse—particularly by the early 1960s, the time of production on Liberty Valance, when he was a box-office institution. Gratitude to Ford for rescuing him from “B” Westerns with Stagecoach can only account for some of his forbearance.

True, there was also the possibility that Ford would offer Wayne the chance to play increasingly psychologically complex variations on the ideal of American manhood. But I think something else was involved, the same dynamic behind Montgomery’s work on this movie: the chance to learn from a master of movie-making.

By the mid-1940s, Montgomery—more famous these days, as I indicated in a prior post, as the father of Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery—was a highly regarded actor with his eye now trained on behind-the-camera work. A year later, he would finally have the chance to direct his first film, an unusual adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective novel The Lady in the Lake.  

But as he was playing the lead in They Were Expendable, Lt. John Brickley (based on the real-life war hero Lt. John Bulkeley), the actor—a bit nervous about not being in front of the camera for three years during the war—was thinking about the next turn in his career. He didn’t protest when Ford, after filming a scene according to his suggestion, then told him to take the reel home with him, as they wouldn’t be using it.

Weeks later, after Ford suffered an injury while on location in Florida, he had Montgomery film action sequences while he was recuperating. In what must have thrilled the actor, Ford later claimed that he couldn’t tell the differences between these scenes and those he had filmed.

As for Wayne: Playing Brickley’s second-in-command, Lieutenant "Rusty" Ryan, was not only a chance for a high-profile role in something besides a western, or even for making sizable elements of the public forget his less-than-glorious part in the war, but also an opportunity to learn lessons in directing from the universally acknowledged master of the art.

By this time, a project of his own was germinating in Wayne’s mind: making a film about the Alamo. Over the next 15 years, he would hire researchers and put much of his own money behind this account of the legendary last-ditch stand against Santa Ana. Even now, he was absorbing by osmosis how to frame shots and other aspects of film.

The Alamo was similar to They Were Expendable as a study of sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds. But, if film could be likened to song, Wayne had learned the words but not the music that would make the experience indelible.

Over the course of his long career, Ford assembled a de facto stock company of actors who, for better or worse, were willing to endure his on-set dictatorship. He knew their talents and fit roles to them, and had learned to work even more smoothly with screenwriters such as Wead and Frank Nugent (a former movie critic who would write the script for The Searchers and other classic Ford westerns).

Wayne could not count on the same assets in making The Alamo. He could not secure actors he had hoped for principal roles (Clark Gable, Charlton Heston), so he had to hope that the ones he did secure (Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey) would mesh well with each other under his direction—a hope unfulfilled in the final product. 

More fatally, for all his interest in recreating the Alamo with almost documentary exactness, Wayne lacked Ford’s intense psychological identification with his material. From Midway to D-Day, Ford had not just filmed men under fire but also, as one himself shooting amid the roar of battle, he had imbibed their attitude toward war as a matter of stoic grace under pressure rather than an exercise in jingoism.

Some of the best moments in They Were Expendable are of men suddenly facing awesome odds with silent, grim but certain resolution: being told, one by one, at a social gathering that Pearl Harbor has been attacked, or, through a fluke of fate, losing one’s place on the plane taking select sailors to the comparative safety of Australia. The Alamo exhibits none of this fatalistic attitude. It is more committed to waving the flag than in honoring the qualities that led men to carry it in the face of death.

The result: while They Were Expendable did not lure a war-weary public to the box office, it has increasingly won critical acclaim as one of the best WWII movies, while The Alamo is a long epic that, for all its admirable intentions, lacks the psychological insight, pacing or extraction of actors' best talents so characteristic of Ford classics.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Maureen O'Hara, ‘Queen of Technicolor’)

Aug. 17, 1920— Maureen FitzSimons—better known to movie fans as Maureen O'Hara, nicknamed “The Queen of Technicolor” for the flaming red hair that made her a natural for this film process—was born in Ranelagh, County Dublin, Ireland.

Even the most casual movie fans are likely to catch an O’Hara performance at least twice a year: on St. Patrick’s Day, in The Quiet Man (1952), and at Christmastime, in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). But her other thirtysomething films—with the great bulk made between 1939, when she initially signed with RKO, and 1968, when she began her third and happiest marriage—are worth seeing throughout the year.

In 2014, less than a year before her death, the beloved star was finally awarded a special "Lifetime Achievement" Oscar. As tends to happen with this special honor, the award was less a recognition than an atonement.

Not only was O’Hara never nominated for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, but her longtime studio, 20th Century-Fox, steered her towards roles that capitalized on her stunning beauty and athleticism (her equestrian and fencing skills led to her casting in westerns and swashbucklers, respectively), not the intensive, wide-ranging training in classical theater and operatic singing she had in her youth in Ireland.

But given the right role, O’Hara invariably measured up to the challenge. In this, she resembled her friend and frequent Fox co-star Tyrone Power. Their talent and comfort with each other might be seen to best advantage in The Long Gray Line, John Ford’s twin valentine to the U.S. military and his Irish-American heritage, in a true account of an emigrant who became a longtime athletic trainer at West Point.

She may have chafed at the narrow range of her roles, particularly how her studio contract restricted any possibility of working with European directors who could have better brought out her versatility. 

But, if she never got to be a “chameleon actor” who could change radically depending on the role, O’Hara was indisputably a “personality star” who left her imprint on each picture she graced.

Her roles invariably reflected her forthright, fearless nature as a self-described “tough Irish lass”—a woman no easy match for the men who came into her orbit but eminently worth the wooing.

Powerful males in the Hollywood community could come away burned by encounters with her:

*Director John Farrow (Mia’s father) was almost punched in front of an entire film set when he made a pass at the starlet;

*Walt Disney, forced by O'Hara to honor a contract, referred to her as “that bitch” (telling this years later, O’Hara said she’d rather be called that than “that wimp”); and

*The scandal sheet “Confidential” (The “National Enquirer” of its time), forced to settle after O’Hara sued it for libel for reporting that she had been spotted cuddling with a Latino in Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. (At trial, O’Hara produced her passport, which showed she was shooting on location abroad at the time of the alleged incident.)

The one figure she was careful in dealing with was John Ford, with whom she made five films. At one point, the director found a way to abuse every single one of the actors who formed a de facto stock company on his films, and O’Hara was no exception. 

“That devil,” as O’Hara called him, actually struck her once, and she claimed she could still smell the field filled with dung where he filmed her for a scene in The Quiet Man. (Perhaps the only time she responded in kind was when, after he unmercifully cursed her for squinting when hair repeatedly blew in her face in one windy scene, she answered, "What would a bald-headed son of a bitch know about hair lashing across his eyeballs?")

Why did she tolerate such abuse? It could not have been simply because she recognized he was in the grip of alcoholism. (That realization did not stop her from divorcing her second husband, screenwriter Will Price, who was guilty of violence, fraud and adultery during their 12-year marriage.)

Part of it may have involved her understanding that he actually displayed what she called “a schoolboy crush” on her. This may have climaxed when the married Ford sent her a Valentine’s Day card, expressing his love and thanking her for the five months they had just spent filming together. (The undated message appears to have been sent during production of The Quiet Man.) If her great friend (and most frequent co-star) John Wayne was Ford’s ideal of a tough, strapping male, then O’Hara was his ideal woman.

But O’Hara undoubtedly also realized that Ford’s genius was capable of translating that love into high art. Two memorable scenes, filmed roughly a decade apart, make the point.

The first, from How Green Was My Valley (1941), shows the wind playing with O'Hara's hair as her character, Angharad, leaves the church after her wedding, with the veil forming a circle around her head.

The second, from The Quiet Man, depicts the moment that Wayne’s “Yank,” Sean Thornton, first lays eyes on O’Hara’s Mary Kate Dannaher. He stops, transfixed—and so is the viewer, momentarily forgetful of the beautiful countryside because of the redheaded dazzler spotted in the middle of it.

Movie Quote of the Day (John Wayne, on Life)

Sgt. Stryker (played by John Wayne): “Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.”— Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), screenplay by Harry Brown and James Edward Grant, based on a story by Harry Brown, directed by Allan Dwan

A prior post of mine focused on the movie that won John Wayne an Oscar after four decades in the industry, True Grit—released on this day 45 years ago. That film dealt in a seriocomic fashion with the nature of courage. Bravery was a major theme—perhaps the defining one—in the career of the actor, who died on this day in 1979 of lung and stomach cancer.

As he had done for the past 15 years, when he defied a longtime industry taboo by disclosing his first operation for cancer, Wayne reacted to the recurrence of his disease with a candor and grace that won the admiration not only of those who regarded him as an American icon, but even of many of those who saw him as the embodiment of militarism and racism. The movie that helped to solidify these contradictory views was Sands of Iwo Jima, which had netted the actor his first Oscar nomination.

It is one of the characteristic ironies of Hollywood that this matinee idol, who never served a day in the armed forces even when so many of his contemporaries did so in WWII, played a career soldier in Sands of Iwo Jima. Over time, his character—a hard-drinking, hard-as-nails Marine sergeant who really does, appearances to the contrary, care about his men, a tower of strength as a soldier but not as husband or father—became a cliché.

Among the actors who played a similar type was Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge. The two actors, in fact, projected similar personas and charted similar career trajectories. Both men began as protégés of genre directors (Wayne, with the pioneer of the film western, John Ford; Eastwood, with “spaghetti western” auteur Sergio Leone and action director Don Siegel). Both were “personality stars” who, rather than utterly transform themselves for roles, played an infinite number of small variations on the same character type. Both made virtual trademarks of elements in their physiques (Wayne: the catlike walk; Eastwood:  the squint) and voices (Wayne: slow, with gathering force; Eastwood: raspy). Both finally achieved significant critical acclaims and Oscars at age 62—Wayne, for True Grit, and Eastwood for directing (and starring in) another western, Unforgiven.  Both, in late middle age, directed films that glorified the Marines (though New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that Eastwood had far the tougher task at this, for “It requires a certain crazy vision to transform the American invasion of Grenada into the equivalent of Iwo Jima”).

You might think that Wayne—who was so professional that he even worked well with co-stars who could not have disagreed with him more on politics, such as Katharine Hepburn and Kirk Douglas—would have welcomed the opportunity to act with Eastwood, whose screen personas and politics were a match for his own. Not a chance. When the younger man broached the idea of working together in the early 1970s, Wayne rejected it immediately. He simply recoiled at the level of violence in Eastwood’s recent High Plains Drifter, and said so. Likewise, the anti-hero that Eastwood played so often was inimical to the heroes that Wayne played in films about the West, which, Wayne noted, represented "the triumph of personal courage over any obstacle, whether nature or man."

Quote of the Day (John Wayne, on Ann-Margret)

“When I die, I want Ann-Margret to dance on my coffin. If you don't see me in five minutes, you'll know I'm dead for sure."—John Wayne, three weeks before his death, on former co-star Ann-Margret, quoted in Paul Rosenfield, “Ann-Margret A-Go-Go,” Vanity Fair, October 1991

In his characteristically gruff (if, in this case, ghoulish) way, The Duke voiced what many American males felt about Ann-Margret in her heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprising in Rosenfield’s article from nearly 20 years ago is one anonymous actress’ contention (denied by A-M) that she was the only woman to have slept with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and JFK. That has to be some kind of trifecta...

(Do you really need to be told that she’s with The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the image accompanying this post, from Viva Las Vegas? This YouTube clip makes us sorry not only that Elvis never had another female co-star to match his charisma onscreen--one reason why his films made a ton of money but little lasting impression--but that the two never made another film together.)

It comes as a shock, then, to realize that the former “Kitten With a Whip” (a title in her own series of mostly forgettable ‘60s films) turns 70 years old today.

But it’s equally a surprise to recall that she first burst upon the nation’s consciousness 50 years ago with an attention-getting performance at the Oscars and a supporting role as Bette Davis‘ innocent daughter in Frank Capra’s last film, Pocketful of Miracles…or that it was 40 years ago that she finally began to earn recognition as an actress, in Carnal Knowledge…or that I was in high school when she scored another Oscar nomination in Tommy.

Many people would be astonished to find out that this woman with the over-the-top screen persona is, in private life, a homebody, or that she’s so sensitive that her co-workers have always been deeply protective of her. (She, in turn, returns that loyalty, as seen in this portion of a 1994 interview by Charlie Rose in which she refuses to say anything that might detract from the memory of Elvis.)

That sensitivity informs what I think of as her best, and bravest, performance: her 1984 TV appearance as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. In this scene, she invests Blanche with emotional fragility over the loss of would-be savior Mitch--and the realization of her fading looks--along with mounting terror over menacing in-law Stanley.

Movie Quote of the Day (Angie Dickinson, Bewitching The Duke)

Feathers (played by Angie Dickinson): “In case you make up your mind, I left my door open. Get a good night's sleep.”
Sheriff John T. Chance (played by John Wayne): “You're not helping me any.”--Rio Bravo (1959), screenplay by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, based on a short story by B.H. McCampbell

Movie Quote of the Day (“True Grit,” with The Duke in a “Dogfall”)

(Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn peers across the field at the four outlaws he’s been pursuing.)

Ned Pepper (played by Robert Duvall): “What's your intention? Do you think one on four is a dogfall?”

Rooster (played by John Wayne): “I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned. Or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience. Which'll it be?"

Ned: “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”

Rooster: “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!”—True Grit (1969), screenplay by Marguerite Roberts, adapted from the novel by Charles Portis, directed by Henry Hathaway

We know how this one ends, don’t we? After all, this is a John Wayne movie.

Well, it is—and it isn’t.

True Grit, released on this date in 1969, came at the end of a decade in which the original film genre questioned and even subverted traditional American notions of virtue and heroism, in fare such as Once Upon a Time in the West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Wild Bunch. No true-blue Western hero—a straight-shooting marshal with no particular ax to grind except justice—could have passed muster in a nation increasingly sensitized to violence, race, and imperialism.

Indeed, Rooster Cogburn is a rusty Galahad if there ever was one to help teenage Mattie Ross on her obsessive quest to find the killers of her father. While not a beginning-to-end comedy like the James Garner vehicle of the same year, Support Your Local Sheriff!, True Grit has more than its share of offbeat frontier humor, rising naturally from ornery characters.

How much of this comes from the original Charles Portis novel vs. Marguerite Roberts’ adaptation, I don’t know. But the wry tone goes a long way toward depicting Cogburn as a far more realistic—i.e., human, warts and all—figure than the norm up until the Sixties.

Cogburn is not only, as Ned notes accurately if insultingly, one-eyed and fat, but he’s also old and frequently drunk, to the initial disgust of Mattie. (In one of the film’s best scenes, a wildly intoxicated Rooster falls off his horse—yet doesn’t spill a single drop of his open whiskey bottle. Many guys I knew in high school wished they could have pulled off that neat trick!)

Like Mattie, film critics came around, much to their surprise, to regard Wayne with affection and even admiration for his work on this film. It took four decades for this most durable of Hollywood stars to establish his credibility with reviewers.

In his 2004 essay collection, Who the Hell’s in It, critic-turned-director-turned-actor Peter Bogdanovich wonders what took them so long, locating their longtime prejudice against this popular star in narrow notions of what acting really constitutes:

“The particular quality in a star that makes audiences instantly suspend their disbelief…is an achievement which normally goes so unnoticed that most people don’t even think of it as acting at all. To a lot of people, acting means fake accents and false noses, and a lot of emoting….John Wayne was at his best precisely when he was simply being what came to be called ‘John Wayne.’”

There are several other reasons—at least one associated with the seemingly Wayne style of acting discussed by Bogdanovich—that might account for why he was routinely dismissed by critics:

* Suppression of artifice—“I don’t act—I react,” Wayne was fond of saying. It’s not a very showy style, but it is true to the laconic speech of his frontier characters. Words don’t matter to them; action—usually coming from his fist or gun barrel—does.
* Modesty—Joseph Cotton puckishly titled his autobiography Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, but despite his recurring box-office success (and his almost-equal success with women), Wayne kept his ego firmly in place. In a fine piece for Huffington Post on “Why John Wayne Still Ranks Among Today’s Most Popular Stars,” John Farr points out that the man who rescued him from B-film purgatory, director John Ford, also—unfairly, given the amount of times he used him—needled the Duke endlessly about his lack of ability. Wayne’s own self-deprecating comments (e.g., “I play John Wayne in every part regardless of the character, and I've been doing okay, haven't I?”) did nothing to convince critics of his versatility, the quality they prized most in actors.
* Conservatism—Especially as the Sixties wore on, Wayne’s reactionary opinions—on the civil-rights movement, Native Americans, and what he believed was un-Americanism—rankled many reviewers. It all came to a head in 1968, when his flagwaving The Green Berets constituted a reel-to-reel brief for the Vietnam War. "After The Green Berets, I never thought I’d be able to take John Wayne seriously again," New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby noted—just before admitting that his mind had been changed by True Grit, pointing to Cogburn as the best role of Wayne’s long career.

A major hypocrisy—or, if you want to be charitable, contradiction or paradox—existed in Wayne: an actor who invariably played heroic roles shunned military service when it mattered in World War II. Wayne never contested his deferments based on age and family status or actively pushed to enlist, though other stars (e.g., Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, Wayne Morris) did so, often at great cost to their careers.

And yet the American public forgave him, with theater owners naming him among the top 10 box-office stars for an unheard-of 25 straight years. He might have been even more popular with those who worked with him, where his unpretentiousness, humor, and generosity in sharing tricks with other actors.

Some final words on courage—an inevitability, given Wayne’s attraction to this quality in his characters, as well as the title of his Oscar-winning film. While Rooster represented something of a parody of his traditional character (as he wisecracked when he won his Oscar, “If I'd known what I know now, I'd put a patch on my eye thirty five years ago"), the actor still displayed the essential physical bravery of a hero. And in the movie’s final image, director Henry Hathaway froze the frame with Wayne high in the saddle—a classic equestrian shot.

Though he showed little courage in facing up to his military obligations, Wayne was exemplary in confronting the disease that finally killed him. Nearly five years before the release of True Grit, he’d had a cancerous left lung removed—then announced to the world that he’d “licked the Big C.” The admission was unusual at the time, because actors afflicted with cancer had then often found themselves unemployable.

His last film, The Shootist, had unmistakable personal overtones because the predicament of his gunman character—a cancer diagnosis—was so like his own.

Ten years to the day that True Grit was released, John Wayne succumbed to stomach cancer—or, as John Ford might say, “went West.” Today, the John Wayne Cancer Institute at St. John’s Health Center works to find a cure for the disease that Wayne battled with the most powerful weapons in his personal arsenal: humor, grace and dignity.

This Day in Film History (John Ford’s “Stagecoach” Opens)

March 2, 1939—The archetypal American western, Stagecoach, opened in general release in the U.S., making a star of 31-year-old John Wayne as the "Ringo Kid" and cementing the status of its director, John Ford, as a hugely influential force in worldwide cinema.

Virtually from the moment that American cinema came into being, with the first narrative film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), from former Edison camera man Edwin S. Porter, the Western has formed the cornerstone of movies. Even Ford had ventured into the genre before Stagecoach, with his silent epic about the transcontinental railroad, The Iron Horse (1924).

But Stagecoach, without forsaking the action that audiences craved, introduced elements more complicated, poetic and character-driven into the genre. For the next quarter-century, Ford would delve deeper and deeper into the form, culminating with a series of films that examined racism, sexism and mythmaking in this essential form of Americana--all set against the awesome but lonesome vistas of Monument Valley.

Critics and other filmmakers began to take notice, just as they did in opening their eyes to Wayne, a frequent but marginal actor up to this point. A decade before, Ford, observing the lean, powerful 6 ft.-4-in. UCLA football player on the set, made him a “fourth-assistant prop boy,” then made him a part of his production company when the young man agreed to step in when a stuntman refused to go into the seas for an underwater sequence because of turbulence in the water.

Raoul Walsh had cast Wayne as the star of The Big Trail (1930) and had even changed his name from Marion Michael Morrison, but the film went nowhere. The actor was stuck for nearly the next decade making more than 40 Westerns, none of which made much of an impression, until Ford cast him as his outlaw hero, The Ringo Kid, in 1939.

Many of Ford’s subsequent films deal with the issues of order and loyalty.

You can see the need for order in the stock company of actors who gave him a comfort level on all of his films--not just Ford and his other longtime star, Henry Fonda, but supporting players like Ward Bond and Ben Johnson.

You can see loyalty in the decades-long relationship between the director and the actor who would become his principal star. The March 2009 issue of Vanity Fair has an article by Buzz Bissinger on how, beginning with Stagecoach, Monument Valley in Arizona came to form the principal backdrop of Ford’s films. But the piece might be even more instructive on the director and Wayne.

The word “crusty” could have been invented for Ford. If you dared to suggest to him how a scene could be improved, you’d better come prepared with earplugs, because he’d let go with a round of profanity-laced verbal buckshot.

For all the major films Wayne ended up making over the next 25 years with Ford—not just all those Westerns, but also the St. Patrick’s Day evergreen, The Quiet Man—the director felt the constant urge to insult him as a “big oaf” and “dumb bastard.”

The Bissinger article doesn’t mention it, but a real sore point between the two became Wayne’s WWII service—or lack of same. Ford had jumped into the conflict early (so early that, on these seemingly aimless drunken fishing trips he’d taken with Wayne, Fonda and Ward Bond in the 1930s down to Mexico and into the Pacific, he’d been secretly photographing shorelines for the War Department, which was already anticipating that conflict would erupt with the Axis Powers).

Despite Ford's constant entreaties to “get into it” (the war), Wayne kept begging off that he needed to make “one more film.” According to Garry Wills’ John Wayne’s America, Ford’s hazing of Wayne got so bad that the actor, in an uncharacteristic move, even briefly walked off the set of one of his films.

Yet Wayne kept coming back for more. He knew that “Pappy” Ford had saved him from the celluloid ashheap—and Ford, with a sense of humor that, when it wasn’t outright abusive, tended more toward Irish-American expressions of endearments through insults, cherished his friendship with “Duke” (enough so that the director, a liberal Democrat, increasingly dispensed discussing politics altogether with his conservative Republican leading man lest they fall into quarrels).

A final word about Stagecoach: its unusual provenance. The basic story grew from several sources. In later decades, when Hollywood creative types took to hawking their ideas to producers with snappy one-liners (e.g., Beverly Hills Cop was “a fish-out-of-water story about a black Detroit detective in Beverly Hills”), Stagecoach could have been marketed as “Grand Hotel way out West.”

But the all-star Best Picture Oscar winner of 1932 wasn’t the only European inspiration for Ford’s landmark Western. If you insist on literary sources, I’m not going to argue with the idea that Stagecoach dates back to The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron—other sagas about groups of travelers varying widely by profession, class, and moral outlook, all thrown together on a very long trip and forced to reveal unlikely things about themselves.

Dudley Nichols’ screenplay was adapted from a Collier’s Magazine short story by Ernest Haycox, “The Stage to Lordsborg.” But there’s another, more unusual source hinted at. The clue is in Claire Trevor’s “scarlet woman” Dallas, driven out of her last town by the respectable women there. Her plight sounds a lot like that in French short-story master Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, about a prostitute riding in a carriage with other refugees at the height of the Franco-Russian War.

Just think—we owe two major pieces of Americana to the French: the Statue of Liberty and Stagecoach. Sacre Dieu!

This Day in Television History (“Lonesome Dove” Premieres)

February 5, 1989—Debuting on a Sunday night when a Canadian cold front made many Americans disinclined to step outside the warm confines of their homes, Lonesome Dove became a major critical and ratings success for CBS. The star-studded adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel not only marked the end of a way of life for the two aging Texas cowboys at its center, but also the end of the heyday of the major network miniseries. 

Though I had seen a prior issue of the magazine in, of all places, a Manhattan newsstand, the February/March issue of American Cowboy finally led me to part with some of my hard-earned cash. The cover story on the 20th anniversary of Lonesome Dove was every bit as good as I had hoped. It brought to mind many fond memories of the mini-series that I followed breathlessly at the time, and it filled me in on quite a bit I didn’t know before. 

(McMurtry is not a fan of the miniseries made from his book, believe it or not. According to an Entertainment Weekly article, one of the major bones he has to pick with it is that Clara Allen—my favorite character in the creative property and, evidently, one of his—looked nothing like the actress who played her, Anjelica Huston. Instead, the person he visualized in the role was—are you ready?—Diane Keaton. Now, I’m as much of a fan of Keaton as anyone, but I have serious doubts about how her 20th-century urban sensibility would translate into the century before.) 

The author of the article, Tom Wilmes, obviously did his homework, rustling up nearly every surviving major person associated with the TV epic (with the notable exceptions of Robert Duvall and Danny Glover). For many who’ve seen the show or read the book, Wilmes’ description of the creative genesis of this property will be eye-opening (I did not realize, for instance, that the rights were optioned by, of all companies, Motown). Believe it or not, however, I think I’ll be able to add more sidelights about this tangled (or should that be tumbleweed?) tale. 

Before he fleshed it out as a novel, McMurtry sketched out the story of former Texas Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call as a film treatment, Streets of Laredo (a title dropped temporarily, then picked up as the sequel to the book and mini-series). Peter Bogdanovich, fresh off his triumph with another McMurtry project, The Last Picture Show, was set to direct. Several of the cast members—Bogdanovich’s new paramour Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, and Ellen Burstyn—had starred in that critically acclaimed 1971 movie. Another set of actors, the Clancy Brothers, were, to say the least, unconventional choices. 

But the real projected stars of the film would have made this a project for the ages. Think of it: Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and John Wayne, all in the sunset movie of their careers. 

When contacted for the American Cowboy article, McMurtry noted that the project appeared to be coming together when it ran into an obstacle: Wayne. “He would have been the Call character in that story, and he didn’t want to play what he considered to be an unlikable, hard-ass character. When he wouldn’t do it, everyone else lost interest.” 

That statement is intriguing, but I think there might have been somewhat more than this at play. If Wayne did not want to play an unsympathetic character, there would have been an easy way around that: Pick either Fonda or Stewart to do it. 

The glorious thing about all three actors is that each could have probably played McCrae as well as Call because they had displayed such versatility in their prior westerns. With a bit of negotiation, one of these two could have switched roles with Wayne, so that he’d get to play talkative Gus while Fonda/Stewart would handle reticent Call. 

But there was another problem with the casting issue: the best roles of Wayne’s career had been as hardasses. I’m not talking about his Sgt. Stryker of Sands of Iwo Jima, his Oscar-nominated turn as the marine who’s tough on his men mostly because the Japanese will destroy them if he doesn’t turn them into killing machines. No, I mean Red River, in which he played a cattle boss who gives adopted son Montgomery Clift the most awful of times, or, better yet, The Searchers, in which he offered a daring portrait of an unregenerate Western racist. 

Even suppose, for the sake of argument, that he was now balking at playing these kinds of antiheroes. I think Wayne would have come around if advised to do so by his mentor, John Ford. Why do I believe this? Because in 1997, I went to an author lecture/signing at Fairleigh Dickinson University featuring Bogdanovich, who was promoting his book Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Legendary Film Directors. I can see now how Bogdanovich came to play a psychoanalyst on The Sopranos: he may have come to filmmaking originally through his work as a movie critic, but his brilliance as a mimic, imitating, in turn, Stewart, Fonda and Wayne, convinced me that he could have made a very comfortable career as an actor as well as a director, had he chosen to do so. 

According to what Bogdanovich said at the FDU lecture, Wayne had, in fact, asked Ford his opinion of the script. The problem was that the great director was now dying. A film about the death of the West—in fact, at a point when the western, the genre that Ford had brought to a creative apogee, was itself going through a decline—was too grim a reminder of Ford’s own mortality. 

So Ford told Wayne not to do the film, and the project collapsed, only to be revived, more than a decade later, with a nearly equally brilliant cast (with Tommy Lee Jones cast as Call, along with Duvall, Glover, Huston, Diane Lane, and the late Robert Urich)—though, inevitably, not one so mythically associated with the western genre. 

Lonesome Dove also arrived toward the end of the heyday of the multipart miniseries on American network TV. Arguably the first, an adaptation of Leon Uris' QB7, had been telecast in 1974. A year after Lonesome Dove saw the appearance of War and Remembrance, which was not the success of its predecessor, The Winds of War. Thereafter the networks left these prestige projects for cable TV. The broadcast landscape has been the poorer for its departure.