Why Wayne?

This year marks a Memorial Day when the ceremonies of honoring our recent fallen brave men and women are, sadly, going full force at Arlington and other military cemeteries. It also by chance is a "holiday" weekend that sees the 100Th Anniversary of the birth of Marion Michael Morrison in Winterset , Iowa. He would grow up to be John Wayne and leave an indelible mark on American pop culture and for many would personify the best of Americans. Other left- oriented Americans would find Wayne's persona a more dubious legacy, given some of the films he produced like "Big Jim McLain" (1951) and "The Green Berets" (1968), films that let us just say have not stood the test of time or were hard to differentiate from agit-prop.

Also Wayne was keen on seeing many of his fellow workers in the film industry blacklisted and their livelihoods curtailed in the 1950's. (Director John Ford is a good contrast here. Ford stood up against Cecil B. DeMille in 1948 at a Director Guild Meeting and spoke up against blacklisting directors. That took guts, folks. And nobody can look at John Ford's canon of films and call him soft on patriotism.)

And yet, in spite of this inconsistency, in spite of controversy, in spite of some reckless views toward dissenting voices he was too easy at times to label as defeatist or traitorous, there is that image of the man himself, Wayne doing something on the screen that very, very few actors can even approach. The picture above is from "The Searchers" (1956), an outstanding film and Wayne's "thousand yard stare" in that film is just one example of how good he is as the disillusioned and bigoted Ethan Edwards. It is a tribute to Wayne that he played his substantial film roles like this one --and many others, from "Red River" to "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" to "Fort Apache" to "Rio Bravo" to"The Shootist"-- and played them so well and filled that screen with a presence that a handful of actors in history can lay claim to.

If you sense I feel an ambivalence toward John Wayne the Man and the Myth, you'd be right. But I promise not to get carried away. I just want to examine one aspect of John Wayne's biography.

It is one of the great ironies of recent American history that "the Duke" became for most of the 20Th Century the essence of the American fighting man. That's because Wayne himself never served in the uniform of the Armed Forces. According to what I've read, he was 34 at the time the US States entered the war and, while other stars his age and older (Melvyn Douglas, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Robert Montgomery, Clark Cable, et al) did go into active service, Wayne himself apparently demurred from going in as an enlisted man, as his mentor John Ford suggested he do. (Ford also served as an officer and film unit director in several combat theaters, including Wake Island in 1942 and in Normandy in 1944.) Wayne did a tour of American forces units in the Pacific in 1944 and visited Vietnam during that conflict.

But he didn't sign up for the armed forces. Wayne stayed doing films in Hollywood--getting some traction for his career because so many other leading men were in uniform . He received a deferment from the draft because of the number of dependents he was supporting and later, he received a different classification because of his status as a popular film actor. At first blush there isn't much wrong with this. World War II turned out generally pretty well for the United States without John Wayne. But why did John Wayne become such a specimen bar none of the American at war, especially the many films he made like "The Longest Day" (1961)? Why not Henry Fonda, who won a Bronze Star for service on a naval destroyer ? Fonda's too far-left you say? OK, what about James Stewart, who flew bombing missions over Europe and also, like Fonda, played his share of American fighting men? Or what about a forgotten actor like Wayne Morris--a guy few people have heard of but who was one of the ace fighter pilots in the Pacific War? Why not those guys for number one top gun? Why Wayne?

I went looking for the best answer I could come up with and the best I can say is this: style doesn't always beat substance, but don't bet the house or even the barn that a fine facade won't win out over substance in the end more often than average.

Update: for a bit more on the career of Naval Air fighter pilot and actor Wayne Morris, check out ths site: http://www.surfnetinc.com/chuck/wmorris.htm

Ironically one of the last credits Morris had was as a frightened front-line lieutenant in Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas' powerful anti-war film, "Paths of Glory" (1957).