Saturdays with the Stars: John Wayne

Each month of 2023 we are taking a look at a star who made their name in westerns, rustling cattle & riding horses during the brief time when cowboys ruled Hollywood.  Last month, we talked about Yul Brynner, whose unusual road to Hollywood came with a series of well-remembered western franchises.  This month, we have reached the inevitable.  The one star you knew would become part of this series, because his visage is tattooed onto the memory of every person who has ever brought up the Hollywood western in conversation.  This month, our star is John Wayne.

Born in Winterset, Iowa, the grandson of an American Civil War veteran, his family was only in Iowa for a short while before his father got a job in California as a pharmacist.  Wayne tried to join the US Naval Academy, but was denied due to his academic performance, and instead got into USC where he was a football star until a bodysurfing accident ended his career, and his time at USC.  He found work in Hollywood as an actor, first playing fictional football players, and then being cast in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, which was a huge flop at the time (history has since rescued its critical reputation), and Wayne was stuck in supporting roles opposite actresses like Barbara Stanwyck & Ann Dvorak, while also appearing in lead roles in a series of Monogram westerns.  In 1939, John Ford saw a promise in Wayne that basically caused him to stick his head outside the studio system.  Wayne's career in B-movies made casting him in a lead role in an expensive western impossible, and indeed, it's actually Claire Trevor, the more established star at the time, who gets top-billing in Stagecoach and not Wayne, who'd become the film's breakout star in its wake.  The film would be a massive hit, getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and for nearly forty years, John Wayne would be an in-demand leading man in Hollywood.

Wayne is at once one of the most iconic & controversial actors of his era.  Often derided by critics for his acting style, which was largely in big-budget westerns & war films, which Wayne was not super discriminate on (reports vary as to why, but Wayne had an almost compulsive need to always be booking his next picture, and between his breakout year in 1939 and his final film The Shootist in 1976, Wayne not only made a movie every single year during that time, but was the leading man in a movie every single one of those years, basically unparalleled in Hollywood history).  Wayne, however, I think is under-heralded because of the (fair) marks on his reputation, and is a pretty good actor who made a lot of good movies.  The nice thing with him is that even though I've seen plenty of his films, there's always more to see, and we'll get to five classics I've never visited this month as we discuss the man most associated with the Hollywood cowboy myth.