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John Wayne's life has been well-documented, and I guess that most
serious filmfans know at least some of his biographical data, that he was
born Marion Robert Morrison (Marion Michael Morrison according to some
sources) in 1907, that he in the 1920's was a promising highschool
footballer, that he started to work in films in the late 1920's as a
stagehand, an extra or in bit parts, some of them were directed by John
Ford, that his first lead was in The
Big Trail in 1930, an epic (A-)Western directed by Raoul Walsh,
that his real breakthrough was John Ford's Stagecoach
from 1939, and that he since then starred in a sheer endless string of
Western classics like Fort Apache (1948, John Ford), Red River
(1948, Howard Hawks), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949, John Ford), Rio
Grande (1950, John Ford), Hondo (1953, John Farrow), The
Searchers (1956, John Ford), Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks), The
Man who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford), Rio Lobo (1970,
Howard Hawks) and True Grit (1969, Henry Hathaway), the film that
finally won him an Oscar. Besides that you might also know that over
the years, Wayne saw himself more and more as the epitomy of the USA, and
eventually his reactionary side more and more began to show, culminating
in the fact that he was one of the very few actors who supported the
Vietnam War, which Wayne even gloryfied in a self-directed film, The
Green Berets (1968, John Wayne, Ray Kellogg), one of the very few
pro-Vietnam War films ever - and it was around that time that Wayne
got out of touch with the young generation and got a bad reputation with
many liberals. You might even know that he
never served in World War II, but made enough films about it (both during
and after the war) to make one think he won the war single-handedly. And of course, you might
also know the fact that Wayne died 1979 from stomach and lung cancer, that he was
married three times, interestingly always to Spanish speaking women, and
that one of his 7 children, Patrick Wayne, also embarked on an acting
career - which however never remotely matched that of his father ...
However,
when reading John Wayne biographies, there is always one period in his
life that is more often than not dismissed by biographers or summed up in a
sentence like "... during that time, he kept himself occupied working
on a
string of B-movies and serials ..." - and this period is the 1930's,
to be more precise the time between The
Big Trail and Stagecoach
... which is a downright shame, because the 1930's were one of the most
interesting periods in his life (as he was not yet the superstar he was
from the 1940's onwards but had to struggle to get a job) as well as in
the development of B-pictures (especially B-Westerns, naturally) and
action cinema as such.
Well, needless to say, with this article
I tend to bridge that gap. Let's start in 1930: With just a few bit
parts and appearances as an extra as well as limited experience as a
stagehand under his belt, John Wayne was chosen to star in Fox
Film's The
Big Trail (1930, Raoul Walsh), a big budgeted A-Western that was
destined to introduce the new 70 mm-film and a process called Grandeur.
And if you believed the ads, The
Big Trail - a film about the hardships of a treck of settlers on
the Oregon Trail - was the big thing of the season, and Grandeur the next
important development in cinema technology after the introduction of
sound. And having been in a film that was announced as a milestone
even before its release should have made the career of whoever starred in
it - in this case John Wayne (whose alias John Wayne was created
especially for this film since Marion Morrison sounded way too feminine
for a Western hero). ... but the film quite simply bombed.
The
failure of the film though was not so much the fault of leading man Wayne
or director Walsh or anyone else involved in the project, but an
over-reliance on the Grandeur-process for which the film was designed -
though hardly any exhibitors had the technology to play the movie as intended
(2 in total), as most exhibitors still recovered from the costly switch to
sound cinema. So at the same time, a 35 mm version had to be shot for your
average moviehouse, which was naturally less impressive than its 70 mm counterpart.
But this was not the only reason the costs for The
Big Trail skyrocketed. The film was also made on an epic
scale unheard of up until then, filmed in locations througout the USA with
hundreds of extras, dozens of covered wagons and one scene more complex and
elaborate than the last. This on one hand led to an immensely impressive
Western - but on the other hand to a budget exceeding 2 million Dollars, a
sum unheard of for a single film in 1930.
When the film sank at
the box office, John Wayne went down with it, and it seemed his career was
over before it begun. He played prominent roles in two more films for Fox
Film, Girls Demand Excitement (1931, Seymour Felix) - which
reunited him with Marguerite Churchill, leading woman of The
Big Trail - and Three Girls Lost (1931, Sidney Lanfield),
but neither was a Western and neither a particular success. Eventually,
the association of Wayne and Fox
Film came to an end, and he next hooked up with Columbia
for a string of B-movies, both Westerns and non-Westerns, however he only very
rarely played the lead in those, but supported Columbia's
stable of leading men like Buck Jones (Range Feud [1931, D.Ross
Lederman]), Jack Holt (Maker of Men [1931, Edward Sedgwick]) or Tim
McCoy (Texas Cyclone, Two-Fisted Law [both 1932, D.Ross
Lederman], with John Wayne's character being called Duke in the
latter). However, when Wayne had a fall-out with Columbia's
president Harry Cohn, his roles with the company got smaller and smaller,
and eventually, seeing his career going nowhere, Wayne thought it best to
part ways with the company.
Wayne's next stop on his road to
fame was Mascot
Pictures, a little outfit that produced almost exclusively serials
- and some of them were among the best there were on the market [for
an article on Mascot, click here]. Mascot
had a bit of a reputation to hire both young hopefuls who haven't quite
made it elsewhere and erstwhile stars on their way down ... and after the
financial desaster of The
Big Trail, Wayne was a bit of both actually. Mascot
offered Wayne the lead in three of their serials, The Shadow of the
Eagle (1932, Ford L.Beebe) - a mystery with Wayne as an aviator,
consequently involving much airplane action -, Hurricane
Express (1932, J.P.McGowan, Armand Schaefer) - another mystery,
this time involving trains and airplanes -, and The Three Musketeers
(1933, Colbert Clark, Armand Schaefer) - an updated version
of Alexandre Dumas' Three
Musketeers, with the plot transplanted to Africa and the
Musketeers turned into Foreign Legionnaires, plus a young Lon Chaney jr
is also in this one [Lon Chaney jr
bio - click here]. None of these serials was a Western, but
always remember, Wayne was not established as a Western actor yet. Now
admittedly, the Mascot-serials
were hardly what would qualify as cinematic art, they were obviously made
on the cheap and had a certain hurried look one just can't deny - but that
said, they are also highly entertaining, fast paced, full of action, and
they hit just the right note with their target audience, mainly young boys
- and they gave John Wayne plenty of opportunity to prove his qualities as
a leading man. And what might be even more important, when filming the Mascot-serials,
Wayne would meet Yakima Canutt, stuntman extraordinaire, who would not
only teach him basic stunting skills (which he needed in serials and
B-pictures back in the days) but also become his lifelong friend and
advisor. Yakima Canutt was a stuntman and actor specialized in
Westerns who was in movies since the mid-1910's, and in the mid-1920's, he
even had starring roles in a few Westerns for Goodwill Productions,
some of them even produced by himself - however, as an actor he
simply was not leading man material while as a (Western-)stuntman he was a
genius ... the things he could do with a stagecoach were simply limitless. (By
the way, Canutt did continue acting up until the 1950's, but mainly in
bit-parts or as characters that had to get into particularly rough
situations like the villain's lead henchman.) It wasn't only Canutt's
stunting that made Wayne look good, he was also instrumental in teaching
him how to be a screen cowboy, like how to walk in his cowboy boots, how
to convincingly draw his gun and stuff. In every iconic John Wayne
picture, I dare say, there is a little bit of Yakima Canutt ...
The
three Mascot-serials
might not have made John Wayne a bona fide star but at least a
matinee-idol that proved bankable enough for low budget pictures - and as
such, John Wayne knocked on the doors of producer John Schlesinger of Warner
Brothers in 1933 to ask for employment, and wouldn't you know it,
Schlesinger could help out: Schlesinger had a bunch of Ken Maynard-silent
Westerns on hand he wanted to remake as sound films, but - to save a buck
or two - he just wanted to reshoot the talking sequences while lifting the
action sequences (which really made the fims) directly from the silents.
So, in a sextet of films known as the 4
Star-series - Ride
him Cowboy (1932, Fred Allen), The Big Stampede (1932, Tenny
Wright), Haunted Gold (1932, Mack V.Wright), The Telegaph Trail
(1933, Tenny Wright), Somewhere in Sonora and The Man from
Monterey (both 1933, Mack V.Wright) -, John Wayne had to do the
talking for Maynard while Maynard had to do the action for Wayne - well,
in a way. This can't have been a very satisfying job, and the films are
pretty much forgotten nowadays and deservedly so, but it was bread on the
butter for Wayne, back then still a struggling young actor. (Interesting
remark on the side: Wayne's horse in these films is called Duke,
and several sources claim Wayne's own nickname comes from there - while
other quotes say it comes from his childhood dog of the same name ... maybe we will never know ... and maybe we don't even care
...)
Besides the Warner
Brothers-Westerns, Wayne could also be seen in a few non-Westerns,
like Lady and Gent (1932, Stephen Roberts) for Paramount,
which sees him as a boxer, the independently-produced romantic comedy (!) His
Private Secretary (1932, Phil Whitman), and the Barbara
Stanwyck-starrer Baby Face (1933, Alfred E.Greene), that was quite
a scandal upon its release, but Wayne left a big impression in neither of
these films and it became more and more clear that Westerns were indeed
his thing.
In 1933, after Warner
Brothers had used up all its Ken Maynard stock footage for the 4 Star-series,
they decided to discontinue the series and let Wayne go rather than shoot
complete Westerns with him as star. However, independent production outfit
Monogram,
which was on the look-out for a cowboy actor to replace Bob Steele
anyways, thought Wayne to be a bankable enough cowboy actor to star in a
series of cheaply produced Westerns that were made to look almost like a
continuation of the Warner
Brothers-series - up to a point where Monogram
was billed as Lone
Star Productions in the credits ... This might now all
sound cheap and derivative, but actually, John
Wayne's Monogram-series - 16 fims in total - consisted of some
of the best B-Westerns produced in the 1930's, some of them even outdoing
some of the weaker A-Westerns Wayne did later on. The quality of
these Westerns can in no small part be attributed to the series regular
director Robert N.Bradbury (he directed 11 of 16 films of the series),
who had also directed most of Bob Steele's Monogram-Westerns
before Wayne came along (and was incidently Bob Steele's father) [Bob
Steele bio - click here], and who
was not only one of the most versatile Western directors, his timing was
also perfect to make his films as exciting as possible, he and cameraman
Archie Stout would always give their movies a visual polish often lacking
in other B-Westerns, and Bradbury was always adamant to try out new ideas
and plot-elements and -devices to take his Westerns (by and large a very
pre-defined and rigid genre) into new directions, often constructing his
films like murder mysteries (complete with the then customary masked
killers and secret passageways). He also didn't shy away from including
car chases in his Westerns, sometimes giving these chases a comedic spin.
Bradbury's
first film with Wayne, Riders
of Destiny (1933) already proves that, when Bradbury has John
Wayne (probably dubbed by someone else) sing a few tunes years before Gene
Autry started the singing-cowboy-craze with Phantom
Empire (1935, Otto Brower, B.Reeves Eason). Now most of Wayne's
singing in this film seems at least a little out of place, but when he in
the finale sings a haunting tune before shooting his opponent Earl Dwire's
both wrists, this is positively creepy stuff. (The singing-cowboy-routine
is later repeated in The
Man from Utah [1934, Robert N.Bradbury], but unfortunately not to
the same effect.) A later film in the series, Lawless
Frontier (1934, Robert N.Bradbury), has one of the most
exhilarating chase scenes in Western history that at one point has Wayne
ride through the sewers on a plank of wood (!) - just like a witch riding
a broomstick. The
Star Packer (1934, Robert N.Bradbury) not only features a villain
(Gabby
Hayes) that poses as a harmless hunchback but also uses a machinegun in the
finale decades before Django
(1966, Sergio Corbucci). The Lucky Texan (1933, Robert
N.Bradbury) features a chase oldtimer vs railway utility car and Wayne
chasing a baddie on horseback riding another plank of wood down the sewers. The
Trail Beyond (1934, Robert N.Bradbury) is set in Canada, if only for a change of
scenery (the Canadian coniferous forests look great on film though).
Other films in the series were Sagebrush
Trail (1933, Armand Schaefer), West
of the Divide, Blue Steel (both 1934, Robert N.Bradbury), Randy
Rides Alone, 'neath
the Arizona Skies (both 1934, Harry L.Fraser), Texas
Terror, Rainbow Valley, The Dawn Rider (all three
1935, Robert N.Bradbury), The Desert Trail (1935, Lewis D.Collins),
and Paradise Canyon (1935, Carl Pierson), and each of these films
had at least something going for it.
One thing, besides the
direction, that makes John
Wayne's Monogram-Westerns so immensely enjoyable is Yakima
Canutt's excellent stunt work that for some reason rarely looked better
than in these films, and especially his stagecoach stunts overshadow his
similar work in the way more famous Stagecoach
(1939, John Ford) to no small extent. (By the way, Canutt played small
parts in many of these movies, mostly the villain or the villain's
henchman, but his funniest performance is in The
Star Packer, where he plays John Wayne's native American sidekick.) ...
and then there was George Hayes, who was a fixture of a series and who had
various roles, from typical cowboy sidekick to local Sheriff to villain
(e.g. The Star Packer)
and who was still a few years away from becoming the perennial sidekick
first on the Hopalong Cassidy series and later in dozens of
Roy Rogers films [Roy Rogers bio
- click here]. But even before his sidekicking has become routine, he
gave able support to Wayne in these films. (By the way, it was
during the filming of John
Wayne's Monogram-Westerns that the pass system - a
method to convincingly fake fistfights by narrowly passing the opponent
while the camera films it from an angle that makes it look real - was
invented when after a staged fight director Bradbury found both his
leading man - Wayne - and his stuntman - Canutt - too roughed up for comfort.)
In
1935, roughly about the time John Wayne had completed his second season of
Monogram-Westerns
- a season of Westerns traditionally consisted of 8 films -, Monogram
seized to exist (at least for a while), when it became part of the merger
that ultimately created Republic
Pictures [Republic
history - click here] - other companies included in this merger were
Mascot,
Liberty, Majestic
and Chesterfield/Invincible,
and the film developing outfit Consolidated Film Laboratories. It
seems though the powers-that-be at Republic
were pleased enough with Wayne's performances to keep him on board for
another series of Westerns. The eight films of this series were Westward
Ho, Lawless Range (both 1935, Robert N.Bradbury), The New
Frontier (1935, Carl Pierson), The Oregon Trail (1936, Scott
Pembroke), The Lawless Nineties, King of the Pecos, The
Lonely Trail (all three 1936, Joseph Kane), and Winds
of the Wasteland (1936, Mack V.Wright) - and even if the genius of
Robert N.Bradbury is missing from the later films of the series, by and
large they are well-done B-Westerns, and at least the stagecoach race of
Winds
of the Wasteland is well worth mentioning - and watching.
After
his association with Republic
came to an end, Wayne went over to Universal,
to star in a string of non-Western Bs: Sea Spoilers (1936, Frank
R.Strayer) - a marine adventure that has him as captain of the Coast Guard
-, Conflict (1936, David Howard) - a boxing drama based on a story
by Jack London -, Carlifornia Straight Ahead (1937, Arthur Lubin) -
in this one Wayne's a trucker -, I Cover the War (1937, Arthur
Lubin) - Wayne is a newsreel cameraman covering an Arab uprising against
the British -, Idol of the Crowds (1937, Arthur Lubin) - this time
Wayne's a hockey player pitted against gangsters -, and Adventure's End
(1937, Arthur Lubin) - here, Wayne's a pearl diver.
By and large,
these films were ok-done adventures, but Wayne failed to impress in them
like he did in his Westerns, and ultimately the way was back to Westerns
first (with the Paramount-produced
Born to the West/Hell
Town [1937, Charles Barton]), and back to Republic
[Republic history - click
here] second ... It was in 1936 that - with the film The
Three Mesquiteers (Ray Taylor) - Republic
had started a series about a trio of cowboys - you guessed it, The
Three Mesquiteers - based on the stories/characters of William
Colt McDonald. Initially, the trio was played by Bob Livingston, Ray Crash
Corrigan [Ray Crash Corrigan
bio - click here] and Syd Saylor, but already after the first
film, Saylor was replaced by Max Terhune. And after 16 films, Bob
Livingston left the group because Republic
needed him for bigger, better things like the serial The Lone
Ranger Rides Again (1939, John English, William Witney) (and
eventually he would leave Republic
for PRC to
find his luck in the Lone
Rider-series [PRC history
- click here]). As a
replacement for Livingston, Republic
hired John Wayne to play Stony Brook, the lead in one of their most
popular series. In all, Wayne starred in 8 films of the series - Pals
of the Saddle, Overland
Stage Raiders, Santa Fe Stampede, Red River Range
(all 1938, George Sherman), The Night Riders, Three Texas Steers,
Wyoming Outlaw, and Frontier
Horizon/New
Frontier (all 1939, George Sherman) - and he was sided by Ray
Crash Corrigan in all of them and by Max Terhune in the first six of them,
who was replaced by Raymond Hatton for the last two. Generally speaking,
Wayne's Three
Mesquiteers-films were all solid B-Westerns, but they were
just a little too polished for die-hard B-movie fans like me and lacked
the spark of e.g. John
Wayne's Monogram-Westerns.
When the last films of Wayne's
run on the series came out, Wayne had already shot to A-movie fame with Stagecoach
and he wisely decided to no longer star in B-movies - and in about as wise
a decision, Republic,
who still had him under contract, did not force him to but instead used
his sudden high profile to produce a few A-Westerns starring Wayne of
their own - e.g. Dark Command (1940, Raoul Walsh), Three Faces
West (1940, Bernhard Vorhaus), Angel and the Badman (1947,
James Edward Grant) and the classic Rio
Grande (1950, John Ford) - as well as loaning him out to other
(bigger) studios. The rest, as they say is history, and
is a tale I might (or might not) tell some other time ... PS:
Wayne's role of Stony Brook with the Three
Mesquiteers fell back to his predecessor Bob Livingston for
another 14 films, then to Tom Tyler - the man John Wayne travelled through
half the country to shoot in Stagecoach
- for the final 13 films [Tom Tyler-bio
- click here]. In 1943, the series was - after 51 pictures,
finally put out to pastures ...
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