OVP: How the West Was Won (1963)

Film: How the West Was Won (1963)

Stars: Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Spencer Tracy, Walter Brennan, Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter, Russ Tamblyn, Raymond Massey, Mickey Shaughnessy

Director: Henry Hathaway, John Ford, & George Marshall

Oscar History: 8 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Original Screenplay*, Film Editing*, Sound*, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Debbie Reynolds: click here to learn more about Ms. Reynolds (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We cannot do a month devoted to Debbie Reynolds without talking about one of the most famous scandals of the Classical Hollywood era, her relationship with Eddie Fisher.  Fisher was a major singer at the time, on-par with acts like Fabian and Elvis Presley in terms of his popularity, and even had his own hit television program.  The two were the equivalent of what today we'd think of as Zendaya & Tom Holland (or for you older people, Brad Pitt & Jennifer Aniston)-America's Sweethearts, the boy and girl next door who had married each other.  Their marriage was rocky when it wasn't on the front pages, though, with Fisher a serial philanderer, including an affair with Playboy Playmate Pat Sheehan.  But it was when he had an affair with Elizabeth Taylor, the rare celebrity at the time on-par with Reynolds & Fisher, that the entire world paid attention.  Taylor, who had recently been widowed after the death of producer Mike Todd, was best friends with Reynolds, but still ended up in bed with her husband.  The scandal was sensational, one of the biggest celebrity news stories of the decade, and it had bizarre implications for all involved.  Reynolds, of course, was canonized as the scorned woman, and would have five movies come out in 1959 alone.  Elizabeth Taylor, the mistress, normally would've been the one to pay the price in the public's eye, but she was fine career-wise.  Within a year she was clutching her first Oscar, and a few years later would become the highest-paid actress in film history (and the centerpiece of an equally-famous affair) on the set of Cleopatra.  Instead it was Eddie Fisher who actually paid a career price, with his show being cancelled and his music career largely being destroyed.  It's hard to grasp now, but at the time Fisher was as big of a deal as Reynolds & Taylor were...now, he's nothing but an asterisk compared to the two women, who famously years after they'd both left Fisher reconciled and even starred in a film written by Fisher & Reynolds' daughter Carrie.

(Spoilers Ahead) During the wake of the scandal, Reynolds got a lot of career mileage and a number of hit movies, one of the biggest being today's film How the West Was Won.  The movie is less a cohesive story, and more a series of vignettes that tell the tale of how the American West began as well as how it ended, but the centerpiece around the film is Reynolds, who despite not getting top-billing (it went alphabetically for all of the main stars) is the movie's main character as Lilith Prescott, a woman dragged to the wilderness by her parents (Moorehead & Malden), and then when they die, she ends up making the west her home, marrying a scoundrel (Peck) who ends up making good, and eventually settling in the West with her nephew (Peppard) after most of the rest of her family dies.  In the meantime, we get pirates (led by Walter Brennan), the growth of the railroad, and, oh yeah, the Civil War.  

The movie is BIG, and it's not afraid of it.  There's a reason it has three directors and 17 (not a typo, I counted) Oscar-nominated actors on the call sheet.  But the thing is-it's not very good.  None of the actors are giving particularly good performances, and given who they are, that's a crime.  The best in the cast might be...Wallach, only because he gets to play a villain?  Honestly, even that feels like a stretch to me.  It's more a cavalcade of cameos, each seemingly doing John Ford a favor by appearing in a movie that would be such a big hit it'd be a weird case of it being one of their signature movies of the 1960's despite only Reynolds being in very much of the picture.  It deals a lot with cliche, and trying to shove what would've been a miniseries today into a couple of hours of celluloid.

The film won eight Academy Award nominations, and they're a mixed bag, but definitely not all bad.  The movie's screenplay win is abject silliness (it barely runs together as a plot!), and the same can be said for the editors, who probably got this nomination because it was a novel concept to have unrelated stories start to blend this way, but just because it's unique doesn't mean it's good.  The art direction & costume nominations are better, but less inspired.  The art direction feels more a tribute to the beauty of nature in the film, which is definitely on-display (also, because this is shot in Cinerama there's a lot more art direction than you'd normally expect), and the costumes are fine though nothing stands out in particular.  It's the last three nominations that worked best and felt most-earned.  The film's cinematography, capturing the beauty of the west (lots of this was shot off a studio lot), and it also works really well in conjunction with the stunt and effects teams (the Civil War & river rapids sequences, in particular, are the stuff that makes you wonder why it's taken so long to get a Stunts Oscar).  This also works for the sound work, with a lot of the action set pieces feeling really in-your-face, and it works well with the film's high musical quotient.  And of course Alfred Newman's score, generally considered to be his best work, is spectacularly grand.  All-in-all, there's a lot of elements of a classic here...if only the movie itself were any good.

2023 Saturdays with the Stars Recap

Yesterday we finished up our month with Kris Kristofferson, and today, we are putting the final cap on our "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood" season.  I will totally own this, our fifth season, is probably my favorite season we've done since Season 2 (when we tackled sex symbols), and maybe my favorite ever.  I knew going into this that westerns have always been one of my favorite genres, and getting to see such a wide array, including a lot of hidden gems that have been on the To Do list for a while, was an absolute treat.  But I didn't realize how many of the films would end up being downright classics, from Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy to some of the gorgeous westerns that Anthony Mann made with Jimmy Stewart, there are movies on this list that have quickly catapulted to my favorite westerns list, and I have even added a few already to my home collection.

The biggest thing that excited me, though, was how this really ended up being the tale of Hollywood, starting with The Big Trail and ending with Heaven's Gate, and how much of Classical & New Hollywood came in-between.  This has been the case in all of our seasons, but seeing it through the most American of genres, the western, it felt like I was hearing it for the first time.  We'll get into our sixth season, where we will be "Crowning America's Sweethearts," on Saturday, but one last time, take a look at some of the best from this season of "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood."

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Gary Cooper, Man of the West

February: James Stewart, The Naked Spur

March: Gregory Peck, The Gunfighter

April: Marlene Dietrich, Witness for the Prosecution

May: Randolph Scott, Ride the High Country

June: Yul Brynner, Westworld

July: John Wayne, The Shootist

August: Franco Nero, Querelle

September: Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

October: Robert Redford, Barefoot in the Park

November: Sam Elliott, Molly and Lawless John

December: Kris Kristofferson, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

5 Favorite Performers (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Marlene Dietrich

Clint Eastwood

Robert Redford

James Stewart

John Wayne

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Marlene Dietrich, Witness for the Prosecution

Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

James Stewart, The Man from Laramie

James Stewart, The Naked Spur

John Wayne, The Shootist

12 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

The Big Country

Destry Rides Again

A Fistful of Dollars

For a Few Dollars More

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

High Plains Drifter

The Naked Spur

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Ride the High Country

Westworld

Winchester 73

Witness for the Prosecution

Top 12 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Ellen Burstyn, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Dan Duryea, Winchester 73

Mariette Hartley, Ride the High Country

Burl Ives, The Big Country

Katy Jurado, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Diane Ladd, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Elsa Lanchester, Witness for the Prosecution

Charles Laughton, Witness for the Prosecution

Una O'Connor, Witness for the Prosecution

Lee van Cleef, For a Few Dollars More

Lee van Cleef, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

OVP: The Shootist (1976)

Film: The Shootist (1976)

Stars: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, Sheree North

Director: Don Siegel

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the 1970's, John Wayne as a persona was not something the hip, New Hollywood cinema had an obvious fit for, but the actor was bankable & kept working.  True Grit had been a proper hit, and he actually ended up acting for much of the decade while other headliners of his generation like Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart had to sit back and take supporting parts.  Films like Big Jake, The Cowboys, McQ, and Rooster Cogburn (a sequel to True Grit) all made money, and it was pretty clear at this point that it wasn't going to be changing tastes that eventually stopped John Wayne, but instead Father Time.  That came to pass in 1976 with The Shootist.  Wayne once again donned his cowboy hat and spurs, but this would be the last time that he would.  Fittingly, in many ways it recalls a film that he once turned down (The Gunfighter), and stars a host of major names of the past to watch him in his final ride.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Shootist takes place over the course of a single week, and starts with gunfighter JB Brooks (Wayne) finding out from his physician, Doc Hostetler (Stewart) that he is dying of cancer, and will soon die of that if he doesn't go out in a blaze of glory.  The film then becomes a series of vignettes, with Brooks meeting with a number of people from his past, many of whom are trying to profit off of their connections with a famous gunslinger since he will no longer be able to gain from it himself.  During this time, he lives in a boarding house run by Bond Rogers (Bacall), a widowed mother of a young man named Gillom (Howard) who is fascinated by Brooks' history of violence and death.  As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Brooks will not go down to cancer, but instead (in a very rare moment for a John Wayne film, as the actor only died a handful of times onscreen during his fifty-year career) he is killed in a gunfight, one that hopefully turns off Gillom (who flees rather than engages, despite his obsession with this type of violence) and protects the next generation from the mistakes of the past.

The Shootist on its merits is an oddly-structured film.  The vignettes take a bit to get used to, particularly given that you rarely can tell which characters are going to stick around and which you need to invest into, and honestly, because in many cases actors like John Carradine & Harry Morgan feel less like they are paying tribute to the film itself, and more are there marveling at Wayne, doing his final ride.  That morbid curiosity, quite frankly, is what makes The Shootist worth something.  If you take it just as a movie, it's okay, but forgettable.  But understanding that Wayne, one of the most important figures of the Old Hollywood era, was coming to an end (in many ways taking that era with him), something that Wayne himself likely understood given his age, it makes the film a lot more powerful.  It helps that Wayne is very solid in this movie, playing the part with a type of desperation, a type of bargaining, that feels unusual for the two-dimensional actor, giving a fine performance (a worthier performance to give him an Oscar for than True Grit if the Academy had been inclined).

Wayne never made a movie again.  Contrary to common belief, Wayne wasn't battling cancer when this film was made, though he did struggle with a serious case of influenza during the filming of the movie.  In 1979, though, he was afflicted with it when he was given the task of handing the Best Picture Oscar to The Deer Hunter (a movie, let's be honest, the conservative Wayne probably loathed), and if you look at the clip you can see a visibly shaken Wayne, getting a standing ovation (which in those days of the Academy were quite rare) while longtime colleagues like Gregory Peck & Laurence Olivier look on the verge of tears.  Wayne opened the presentation, a little winded and his voice breaking just slightly, with "(Oscar) and I are both a little weather-beaten, but we're both still here, and plan to be around for a whole lot longer."  The Hollywood icon would be dead just 9 weeks later.

With us finishing John Wayne month, the quintessential cowboy in our year devoted to the leading stars of westerns, next month we're going to move into a new chapter in our series.  For the final five months of 2023, we'll focus on actors who made their name in westerns during the New Hollywood era, when the western went through a transformation and would eventually fall out-of-fashion.  We'll start with an actor who who would become synonymous with the western, despite hailing from a place far from the American West.

OVP: True Grit (1969)

Film: True Grit (1969)

Stars: John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby, Jeremy Slate, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Corey

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actor-John Wayne*, Original Song-"True Grit")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We talked a lot about John Wayne's career renaissance last week, with a focus on how Wayne was able to make some of the best movies of his career in the late 1950's & early 1960's by skewering or playing with the mold of his career.  That didn't, however, get him Hollywood's top prize.  Despite being a near constant presence in Best Picture nominees like Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, The Alamo, and How the West Was Won, Wayne was only ever cited for acting once prior to 1969, for his work in 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima (he lost to Broderick Crawford).  By 1969, it was clear that Wayne was starting to age, and the system that had made him a legend had collapsed.  True Grit, a massive hit in a year where traditional Hollywood fare was bombing while New Hollywood pictures were resonating with audiences, was a last gasp chance to give Wayne an Oscar, and AMPAS took it.  It is amusing to me that John Wayne, the conservative embodiment of a past generation, won his only Oscar on the same night as Midnight Cowboy, the lone X-rated film to ever win an Academy Award (a film that he probably hated).  Even the Duke knew he was getting this as a career achievement award more than anything else.  As a visibly moved Wayne accepted his statue from Barbra Streisand, he said "if I'd know that, I'd have put that patch on 35 years earlier"...understanding that it was perhaps the 35 years & not the eyepatch that had gotten him to that stage after decades of trying to reach it.

(Spoilers Ahead) True Grit is not really the tale of Wayne's Rooster Cogburn, but of Mattie Ross (Darby), a young girl who is attempting to avenge the death of her father Frank Ross, who was killed by a man named Tom Chaney (Corey).  She looks for someone to bring him in, picking Cogburn to track down Chaney, and offers to pay him, but with the proviso that she wants to come with him, sporting her father's gun along the way.  Initially he refuses, despite needing the money, and tries to abandon her at one point, but after she fords a river (in an impressive show of strength for Darby & the horse), she is allowed to join, along with La Bouef (Campbell), a handsome but dim-witted man who is familiar with Chaney.  Along the way, they meet a number of men connected to Chaney, including small parts played by Dennis Hopper & Robert Duvall quite early in both of their careers (this would've been the same year that Hopper was becoming a household name in Easy Rider), but eventually find Chaney & kill him, though in the process Mattie is injured and La Bouef killed.  The film ends with Mattie promising that she'll bury Rooster Cogburn in her family plot, meaning he now finally has a family of his own.

The movie, I'm sorry to say, is not good.  I didn't like the remake of this by the Coen Brothers, but by comparison that is better, largely because Hailee Steinfeld is not super annoying in that movie.  Darby's Mattie Ross, as I said, is the true central character of the film, but like most parts portraying children at the time (in real life, Darby would've been 21 when this movie was filmed), she is defiant and stringent in this role, and doesn't really have any sense of humanity.  There's a running joke about her wanting to refer everyone to her lawyer that goes nowhere, to the point where you aren't entirely sure it's supposed to be a joke by the film's end.  Darby left me cold.

The same could be said for Wayne, though in a different way.  As you might've been able to guess four weeks into our look at Wayne, despite the actor's complicated politics, I'm a fan.  Wayne had a sturdiness in his pictures that I find really watchable, and when he's great, he is really something to behold.  Given this won an Oscar for Best Actor, I was hoping for one of those special moments from Wayne, but I didn't get it.  This isn't bad, necessarily, but it's not good enough for an Oscar nomination.  John Wayne deserved an Academy Award at some point in his career, and so I'm glad he got one, but when we get to this year in the Oscar Viewing Project, don't expect to see Wayne's name show up-there were considerably better choices.  The film is pretty much a standard-issue Wayne western, not special in any way except for the title song, beautifully sung by one of my favorite singers (his costar Glen Campbell), which swells and is lovingly used throughout the film's score, and would become synonymous with Wayne in the decades that followed.

El Dorado (1966)

Film: El Dorado (1966)

Stars: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Charlene Holt, Paul Fix, Arthur Hunnicutt, Michele Carey, Ed Asner

Director: Howard Hawks

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're making a pretty big jump today in Wayne's career (particularly given we have two more Saturday's left this month) going from 1949 to 1966.  During that time frame, Wayne started to see a shift in his career.  The Duke had a work ethic that bordered on manic, and throughout the 1950's and early 1960's he worked constantly, and this resulted occasionally in bad decisions by Wayne, giving up several major westerns that we've covered for other actors this season of "Saturdays with the Stars" like The Gunfighter and Seven Men from Now.  But during this time, Wayne began to star in some of the best films of his career, movies that would define his persona.  These include The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and today's film, El Dorado.  We'll talk a little bit more about Wayne's reputation as an actor next week, but it has to be said that this is a really impressive run of movies, and it sometimes gets forgotten with Wayne (who made a lot of crap in his career during this time like The Conqueror) just how many classics he was able to get out.  Gene Autry & Roy Rogers were in dozens of westerns too...but they were never in movies this good, which is why Wayne is the actor synonymous with the western to modern audiences.

(Spoilers Ahead) El Dorado takes place in two acts, the first being between two renowned gunslingers, Sheriff JP Harrah (Mitchum) and his old buddy, gun-for-hire Cole Thornton (Wayne).  Thornton is working, he soon realizes, for the bad guys, a rich landowner named Bart Jason (Asner), who is trying to run the MacDonald family off of their land.  Thornton chooses to not work for Bart Jason, but during the confusion of which side he's on, one of the MacDonald sons, still pretty green about the way of gunfighting, shoots at Thornton, and Thornton mortally wounds him.  Another of the MacDonald's, their daughter Joey (Carey), shoots him, and lodges a bullet in his back, which causes him to have paralysis.  Months later, he still hasn't had this bullet removed, and we pick up the saga with us realizing that JP Harrah has become a drunk, a laughingstock who has let Jason's men run roughshod over El Dorado.  Thornton, along with his new sidekick Mississippi (Caan) have to not only fend off Bart's men once-and-for-all, they also have to find a way to sober up JP Harrah enough for him to gain back the respect of the town (and his own self-worth).

El Dorado is interesting for a variety of reasons.  At this point in Wayne's career, while he would never be "hip" he had found ways to upend the stereotypes of the western that he had established in Stagecoach by playing a hero-turned-villain in The Searchers and showing the pessimistic side of the western legend in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  El Dorado is not doing what these films do.  There is a moment in the middle where it feels like it might.  There's a heartbreaking scene where Mitchum realizes that not only is he a drunk, but he's also a laughingstock, a man who prided himself on a rough reputation has become no different than the men whom he used to laugh at at the saloon.  This could've been groundbreaking, but they largely brush it aside even if Mitchum's clearly willing to give it a go in terms of breaking stereotypes.

But El Dorado is instead one of the last classic westerns.  Mitchum & Wayne are in the mold they set in the 1940's, not the mold they would upend in the 1950's.  This isn't meant as an insult-I love the westerns of the 1940's, and El Dorado is extremely well-structured, well-lensed, and while Wayne isn't breaking new mold, Mitchum's giving a strong performance.  At the time it would've been easy to call it old-fashioned, but with the benefit of time, it plays less as out-of-date and more as a swan song for these two men.  Wayne would continue to act, and we'll get to the how's and why's of that in the next two weeks, but this was a good encapsulation of his career at this point-people didn't want anything new from the actor.  He was still a movie star in 1966, frequently a big one (this was a hit), but the brief bit of trailblazing he'd done in the late 1950's & early 1960's in the western was being done by younger, New Hollywood actors.

OVP: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Film: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Stars: John Wayne, Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey, Jr., Mildred Natwick

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Cinematography*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

John Wayne's career is legendary for a variety of reasons.  Obviously, the guy made a lot of classic films, which helps.  Perhaps more importantly, especially in establishing his legacy, was that he made so many films.  Because Wayne was the kind of actor who needed to be famous, maybe because he spent nine years after The Big Trail getting bit work, he didn't want to waste his stardom.  From 1939 until the 1970's, Wayne was the lead in at least one movie every year, in most cases multiple films, which is basically unheard of for an actor of his celebrity, and why your dad can watch so many John Wayne movies (which is usually the claim when people talk about Wayne today, that he's someone whom "your dad/grandpa" watched a lot of his movies).  A big part of that run was films he made with John Ford, one of the biggest directors of the era, and the guy who gave Wayne his second big break (the one that stuck) in Stagecoach in 1939.  All told, the two men made 14 films together, spanning from Stagecoach until 1963's Donovan's Reef.  Many of these were westerns, and while a lot of them I'd seen before (and loved), so they weren't eligible for this series (The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at the top of the list), I couldn't ignore this partnership in a month filled with John Wayne, so we are going to feature today She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, a massive hit the two men achieved for RKO in 1949.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Nathan Brittles (Wayne), who is about to retire from his post in the Frontier Army, but before he does he has to deal with a reservation breakout of the Cheyenne & Arapaho tribes following Custer's defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn (they want to prevent a war).  He also is tasked with bringing his commanding officer's wife (Natwick) and niece Olivia (Dru) to a stage going east.  Olivia, beautiful and headstrong, is being bartered over by several of the men in the company as they try to woo her.  The film itself continues with both missions seemingly lost (it appears as if Brittles will not be able to get the women to their destination, and war is inevitable), but with the help of his men, he manages to trick the Native Americans by stealing their horses, and forcing them to return to the reservation.  In the end, Brittles doesn't retire, instead getting a promotion, and continues on in the army.

The movie itself is somewhat lacking.  This doesn't have the finesse in its screenplay that some of Ford's later partnerships with Wayne would elicit, giving us a pessimistic look at what the Frontier could give (this is very much still in the post-WWII drive of patriotism above all else).  Wayne is playing a man twenty-years his senior quite believably, but most of the rest of the cast isn't as impressive.  Dru is in a side love triangle so ancillary you'll be forgiven for not being able to tell her beau's apart, and if she ended up with the right guy.

Where the film gains all of its glory is in its cinematography.  I recently went to Monument Valley on a vacation, and it really is one of the most beautiful places on earth.  I understand why westerns (and Ford in particular) used it as a filming location, and they called out repeatedly on my tour that this is one of the movies that best shows the land.  It really is glorious.  There's a scene in the rain that is actually rain that kind of has to be seen to be believed, and it's not just pretty pictures.  There's a moment where a stationary camera watches as a charge of horses spring across a shallow river that is magnificent, giving us actual build-up until the moment where the horses are so close, you feel like you have to give the audience a rain poncho.  This is one of those times Oscar got it exactly right.

The Big Trail (1930)

Film: The Big Trail (1930)

Stars: John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, El Brendel, Tully Marshall, Tyrone Power, Sr.

Director: Raoul Walsh

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

John Wayne, as I mentioned in our kickoff, is one of the most storied actors in Classical Hollywood.  His career literally spans the gamut, starting in the early 1930's with our movie today, going through the end of the studio system into New Hollywood (lest we forget, he'd win his Oscar the same night that Midnight Cowboy was beating more classical fare like Hello, Dolly! and Anne of the Thousand Days in a moment that heralded a new era at the most traditional of Tinseltown bastions, the Academy Awards) and into the 1970's.  There are too many chapters in Wayne's career, and so we're going to focus on five key aspects of his stardom throughout July.  Today, we'll talk about how Wayne almost wasn't a movie star, and that was because of a film that in 1930, would've been considered something of a swear word in Hollywood.  The Big Trail was an extremely expensive movie shot for William Fox (eventually the namesake of 20th Century Fox), made in widescreen, and testing the limits of the early Sound Era, and what audiences were looking for.  Shot in 70 mm, the film was ahead-of-its-time, and nearly ruined Wayne's career when it failed to connect with audiences.  It would've been easy to assume at the time that Wayne was destined to be a big name in pictures, but he'd spend nine years following this working in supporting roles in studio films and making ends meet between those parts in Poverty Row westerns.  It wasn't until John Ford basically put his career on the line in 1939 to put Wayne in Stagecoach (his producing partner wanted the more bankable Gary Cooper) that Wayne would become an established presence in Hollywood films, but before we get into the full-phase of Wayne's career, I want to look at what might've been.

(Spoilers Ahead) Plot is kind of incidental to The Big Trail, but it essentially follows Breck Coleman (Wayne) a young fur trapper who is also bent on revenge, as his trapping partner was killed for his furs on the Santa Fe Trail.  Coleman suspects that a man named Red Flack (Power, and yes, he's the father of the more famous Tyrone Power) did it, but before he can confirm Flack and his men are hired to go on the Oregon Trail, and so Coleman agrees to join the same camp, trying to figure out if Flack is guilty or not.  Along the way, he falls in love with a woman named Ruth Cameron (Churchill), who is clearly smitten with him, but is flighty and when she thinks he isn't good enough for her, continues to flirt with one of Flack's men.  In the end, Ruth & Breck end up in each other's arms, and Flack & his cronies end up getting killed in a variety of showdowns.

On its surface, this isn't a particularly good movie.  Wayne has a natural charisma (and has never looked handsomer-perhaps the first & only movie I've ever found myself attracted to John Wayne, one of the more sexless figures in Classical Hollywood), but the rest of the cast is filled with duds, particularly Churchill, who plays Ruth as a whiny brat.  The plot itself is boring, and I understand why audiences didn't get behind this movie initially as it's not well-constructed and the revenge storyline isn't sharp enough.

But if you go just for the "film is a visual medium" angle, you'll find that the movie is marvelous.  As I said above, this was a massively expensive movie, and it shows in every angle.  The art direction is grand, with the background cast of hundreds aiding in making these pop-up villages feel like actual cities, and the cinematography in 70mm is beautiful, wide shots and making sure we get every bit of nature on display.  Even the effects, particularly the scene where they ford the river, are really impressive.  As a result, I'd recommend this one solely on a curiosity basis (and to understand why Wayne was once a heavily-courted romantic lead) because it looks that good.

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.

OVP: The Spoilers (1942)

Film: The Spoilers (1942)

Stars: Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Margaret Lindsay

Director: Ray Enright

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Marlene Dietrich: click here to learn more about Ms. Dietrich (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We have alluded a lot this month to Marlene Dietrich's legendary personal life.  Dietrich's sex life is arguably the most storied in terms of rumor & legend, and it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.  There are the affairs that pretty much everyone agrees happened (Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Yul Brynner) and those that are harder-to-track-down, but are too salacious not to at least mention (Frank Sinatra, Claudette Colbert, Joseph P. Kennedy...and his son President Kennedy).  Dietrich is inarguably the actor I most wish had had a tell-all interview with Oprah.  

One of the actors that pretty much everyone agrees that Dietrich had an affair with was John Wayne, with whom she made a series of pictures in the wake of the success of Destry Rides Again.  After the success of Destry, the studio was adamant to get her back into a western, and Dietrich (according to legend) selected Wayne as her leading man by telling producer Joe Pasternak "Mommy wants that for Christmas" after seeing Wayne for the first time in the Universal Pictures commissary.  The pair made three films together, two westerns (Seven Sinners and The Spoilers) and a rags-to-riches drama called Pittsburgh, and of the trio I thought The Spoilers looked the most interesting (and was an unsee part of the OVP) so we're going with that for our movie today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Taking place in Nome, Alaska, the movie is honestly kind of a mess of a plot, but I'll sort through it just to ground you.  Dietrich, as is her wont in this era, plays a saloon proprietor who has a heart of gold.  That heart belongs to Roy Glennister (Wayne), her old beau who is back from a trip to Europe with a more proper match, the judge's niece Helen (Lindsay).  However, the judge, like most in the film, is corrupt and Roy finds this out too late when he sides with him and the new gold commissioner Alex McNamara (Scott) rather than his old mining partner.  The partner forgives him, and (after donning blackface) they try to disguise themselves and steal back their money from the judge.  The movie ends with Randolph Scott punched in the face, and Dietrich left in Wayne's arms.

The movie doesn't work, and it's partially because the plot is absurd, and occasionally offensive.  Marietta Canty, who plays Dietrich's maid, is arguably the best-in-show in a stereotypical role, getting most of her one-liners out well, though she has to pretend that Wayne in blackface is an actual African-American man which...no.  Not acceptable.  Weirdly, despite real-life heat between them, there's no chemistry between the cavier-and-corn chips pairing of Dietrich & Wayne onscreen.

The movie's sole Oscar nomination was for Art Direction, and I get it.  The beach landing sequence, in particular, is impressively shot and you almost feel like it's actually in an Alaskan shore, it gives off the aura of being properly cold.  But the real achievement is the costume design.  Dietrich's costumes are INSANE, with her wearing ornate choker necklaces and solid gold dresses in the middle of the 19th Century wilderness of the Alaskan Territory, looking like she'd just gotten done cleaning out Bergdorf Goodman.  Costume hadn't been created as a category yet by the Academy, but if it had, it'd have been easy to look beyond the historical inaccuracies & given this a nomination because Dietrich looks that good.

Baby Face (1933)

Film: Baby Face (1933)

Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, John Wayne

Director: Alfred E. Green

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Barbara Stanwyck: click here to learn more about Ms. Stanwyck (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

While Barbara Stanwyck got her start on the stage, first in the Ziegfeld Follies and then on Broadway, she transitioned to film pretty quickly and quite successfully.  She starred early in her film career in Frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure (which sparked a friendship between the two that would pay dividends for both in future films), and was quickly headlining B-pictures for various studios soon after.  We'll talk about this a bit this month, but unlike pretty much every other major player of her era, Barbara Stanwyck was never a contract star.  She managed to become one of the biggest names in Hollywood for two decades without the help of a major studio.  Part of how she pulled that off was today's movie.  Baby Face was a hit, though not a gargantuan one.  But it gained a level of notoriety and fame that quickly elevated Stanwyck to a position that allowed her to not only headline big movies, but four years later, join the upper-crust of Hollywood actresses as an Oscar nominee for Stella Dallas.  Baby Face stands apart as one of the most salacious and well-known Pre-Code films, and after seeing it for the first time, I tend to agree-it's pretty staggering this movie got made in 1933.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a young woman named Lily Powers (Stanwyck) who works at her father's speakeasy as a prostitute, and has since he started pimping her out at the age of 14.  One night, after her father (whom it is strongly suggested sexually abused her when she was a teenager) dies from a whiskey still explosion, Lily decides to move to New York, and under the advisement of an old man she befriended at the speakeasy she "uses her sexuality" to get ahead.  This includes a string of men at her job, frequently sleeping with them to advance her career at work, even if they're married (this includes John Wayne in a very small, very early-in-his-career role).  As she works her way up, she becomes rich and amasses a large fortune, but also can no longer distinguish love from sex.  This is seen as many of these men end up destitute because of their association with Lily, their marriages & careers ruined, but her richer.  This becomes an issue when Courtland Trenholm (Brent), her playboy beau at the end of the movie, asks her to give back all of the bonds & jewelry that he gave her so that he can have a legal defense.  She initially refuses, unable to give up her life's work for a man, but eventually relents, realizing that she actually loves this one, and has found a happiness she couldn't imagine back in the speakeasy.

The movie's frank sexuality would likely get it a PG-13 rating today, which is saying something for a nearly 90-year-old movie.  Baby Face is frequently credited as one of the movies that got Will Hays to start actually enforcing his Code, rather than just paying it lip service, and you see that as it's heavily implied throughout the film that not only is Stanwyck's Lily engaging in sexual favors for money, but she's clearly good at it.  Men become entranced by her, and I'm not kidding by how forthright they are in the film's first ten minutes about her upsetting relationship with her father, and afterward, the way that she seduces a train owner on a boxcar with her maid essentially listening.  It's scandalous stuff, and you wouldn't see movies like this again until the 1960's.

The movie's sole reason for existence is Stanwyck.  The rest of the cast can't compete (not even a very handsome young John Wayne), and honestly they become interchangeable by the film's end.  But Stanwyck is glorious, and it's easy to see why this is heralded as her great star turn.  She has to sell the arch of a woman who is eventually redeemed & finds love...but man does she make sure that getting there is tough.  Stanwyck gives her a rough but still real exterior, clearly impacted by what she's doing to men, but also totally aware that no one is looking out for her, so she needs to ensure that she comes first in this equation.  It's spectacular, and a sign that one of the most singular Hollywood stars of her era had it from the beginning.

Rio Bravo (1959)

Film: Rio Bravo (1959)

Stars: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond

Director: Howard Hawks

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ward Bond: click here to learn more about Mr. Bond (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Ward Bond, as we talked about throughout this month, never really became a leading man on the big screen despite being in classic movies as diverse as It's a Wonderful Life and Gone with the Wind.  He did, however, get a chance to play the leading man on television, starting in 1957 with NBC's Wagon Train.  The show, which had Bond playing wagon master, was inspired by two previous movies, The Big Trail (1930) which is famous for launching the career of John Wayne and Wagon Master (1950), which featured longtime western star Ben Johnson.  Both films also featured Ward Bond, though in supporting parts.  In this series, Bond played Major Seth Adams, who on the trail would meet loads of different famous guest stars from Bond's film days like John Carradine, Ernest Borgnine, Linda Darnell, & Rhonda Fleming.  During this time, though, Bond didn't stop making movies, and he appeared in one major classic during this era, his final film with John Wayne, this time directed by Howard Hawks instead of John Ford: Rio Bravo.

(Spoilers Ahead) Rio Bravo is about Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne), who has recently imprisoned the brother of a notorious land baron for murder after getting into a fight with Dude (Martin), a town drunk.  We learn soon after that Dude is a former deputy of Chance's who has fallen on hard times since he took to the bottle, and along with the aging Stumpy (Brennan), is pretty much the entire town's law enforcement.  This becomes a problem when it's clear that the land baron is coming to get his brother out of jail, and so Chance, after initially refusing the help of his old friend Pat Wheeler (Bond), who dies soon after Chance refuses him, starts to take on more help, including Wheeler's apprentice Colorado (Nelson) and a beautiful woman who has just come to town named Feathers (Dickinson).  Together, they overcome the odds to beat the land baron, and in the process Dude gets a second lease on life, and Chances & Feathers become romantically involved.

Rio Bravo was seen in many ways as a rebuttal to the 1952 classic High Noon, which featured Gary Cooper trying to find someone to help him in a town that doesn't want to get involved.  High Noon was written by Carl Foreman, who was eventually blacklisted, and many view it as a metaphor for the blacklisting that happened in Hollywood during this time frame.  John Wayne, of course, was one of the main instigators during the HUAC investigations, and likely didn't take too kindly to his beloved western being used as political metaphor (even though, the further he went in his career, Wayne's finest films generally did slip into liberal metaphor in pictures like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).  As a result, Rio Bravo is a movie about unlikely allies coming together for a common cause (the irony of our modern political movement being that both High Noon AND Rio Bravo would be considered to have a "woke" message by today's standards).

The thing both movies have in common is they're both excellent.  Rio Bravo is filled with strong performances.  John Wayne, three years after The Searchers (by pretty much every measure, the pinnacle of his career as an actor), had largely eschewed westerns, but this was his way of acknowledging (after a string of flops) that he would never escape the Wayne persona, and so he'd find new ways to say something about it (Liberty Valance, True Grit, and The Shootist would all fall under this umbrella).  Here we see him having the last major film romance of his career, and honestly it kind of works despite his age difference with Dickinson.  Wayne was a byproduct of the studio system, perhaps one of its best myths, while Dickinson was a quintessentially modern woman for the 1960's...that shoe leather & mini skirt combination works really well in an oil-and-water sort of way, and I liked it.  Throw in a great film score (seriously-some of Dean Martin's most romantic onscreen singing with songs like "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me") and beautiful western cinematography, and you have a true classic.

Bond has only a small part.  True-to-form, Bond's billing is a bit higher than what he was able to achieve, and once again he's just doing his character actor duty.  Bond's time in the sun on Wagon Train was very bright (it was at one point the highest-rated show on television), but brief.  In 1960, he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 57; John Wayne, his costar of 22 films, gave the eulogy at his funeral.  Next month, we're going to talk about a contemporary of Bond's, another character actor who made his mark in westerns (including some with Bond himself) but who unlike Bond, would receive critical accolades that would make him far more of a household name before he found his way onto America's TV screens.

The Wings of Eagles (1957)

Film: The Wings of Eagles (1957)

Stars: John Wayne, Dan Dailey, Maureen O'Hara, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ward Bond: click here to learn more about Mr. Bond (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

With apologies to Ward Bond, I took a vacation this month, and so while we will get the full gamut of articles for him (he'll have a second film this afternoon), he'll only get two Saturday's.  Maybe this is okay though.  Ward Bond is an unusual star primarily because he wasn't.  We'll talk this afternoon about what it was like for Bond to briefly step into the spotlight in Wagon Train on television, but despite being in over a hundred movies, most of them with marquee stars from big studios, he almost always plays a small part in those films.  This was why I was excited for Wings of Eagles. It isn't because he has a big part (indeed, it's arguably the smallest role he'll have in our four films this month), but instead it was exciting because it might be the best performance we've seen from him all September.  Sadly, the movie that surrounds it is a complete dud.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on the life of real-life naval aviator Spig Wead (Wayne), who is trying to prove that the Navy should value aviation in combat.  He does endurance races to achieve this, which means that his wife Min (O'Hara) and family are left at home, oftentimes for years at a time while he is off pursuing his professional ambitions.  After falling down a flight of stairs, he is paralyzed & rejects his family further, only hanging with his buddies in the navy like Jughead (Dailey), who finally are able to convince him to "move that toe" (seriously-there is a five-minute sequence of Dailey & Wayne singing and chanting "Move that toe" over-and-over to the point where you think it was a running joke or an inside drinking game between the two actors).  After this, he becomes a Hollywood screenwriter, even meeting famed director John Dodge (Bond), before eventually going back into the Navy one last time, before suffering a heart attack and being forced to fully retire from active duty.

The movie is not strong, and it's honestly the dullest John Ford movie I've ever seen (seriously-Ford is almost always a good time as a moviegoer...I'm confused how his name is on the picture save for the call sheet & the last twenty minutes, where we see some decent combat footage that apparently includes some stuff from real-life).  Wayne & O'Hara, movie magic in other films, are barely in the picture together (O'Hara is sidelined for giant swaths of the picture), and it stretches a thin (if heroic) story past the point of patience.  Worst of the bunch is Dan Dailey, an annoying figure and with the possible exception of Mickey Rooney, my most-loathed Classical Hollywood leading man.

The movie is saved briefly by Bond, who gives the film's best performance, albeit in a very small cameo.  He plays a fictionalized version of the director, and it's a riot.  He even dresses like Ford did in real life (with the sunglasses and omnipresent pipe), and given their extremely long working relationship, you can tell this is both accurate and a gas for Bond, who honestly looks like he & Wayne are about to bust into a blooper real the entire time that Bond is onscreen, it's so much fun.  Had we focused on this relationship, this might've been the rare Ford comedy (and one that would work).  Alas, we're stuck with two hours of tepid war cinema around it.

OVP: They Were Expendable (1945)

Film: They Were Expendable (1945)

Stars: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed, Jack Holt, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound Recording, Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ward Bond: click here to learn more about Mr. Bond (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

All right, I'm aware I skipped the first week of Ward Bond (in the US last weekend was Labor Day and I had family in town & in the year of 2022 we focus on spending time with loved ones at the expense of our responsibilities-that's just the rules), but we won't be skimping on him today, as we're going to do our first ever double-feature so that he gets a full month of movies.  As a result, we're going to talk about a huge chapter of Ward Bond's career in the next few hours.  Bond started as a character actor, and largely stayed there.  Working in B-Grade films in the early 1930's, he did eventually graduate to A-Grade pictures, but almost always as a random "friend of the hero" or a villain of some sorts.  I watched They Were Expendable with my parents last weekend while they were in town, and at one point my mom said "why does he look so familiar?" and it's because Bond's real claim to fame is the breadth of his filmography, and just how many movies he's made.  Bringing Up Baby, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon, It's a Wonderful Life, The Searchers...he is somehow in all of these landmark classics, but always as a bit player or side part.  I have seen all of these movies so I can't watch them for this project, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention them as we kick off our month devoted to Bond, as he's a true character actor, though one who is familiar to virtually any person who has ever watched a classic film.

(Spoilers Ahead) Made in the waning days of World War II, They Were Expendable is the story of a team of men who command a squadron of US Navy PT Boats in the South Pacific.  Lt. John "Brick" Brickley (Montgomery) is sure that they will be an asset to the navy, but his commanding officers remain skeptical, and his friend Lt. JG "Rusty" Ryan (Wayne) is hoping to get his own command, and nearly goes for it when Pearl Harbor is bombed, throwing his entire world into chaos.  The film that follows shows the divergent paths these two men's careers take, with Brick becoming a war hero, his PT boat experience used to sink a Japanese cruiser, while Rusty (sidelined with blood poisoning) falls in love with a nurse named Sandy (Reed) on land, their romance doomed to failure both because it's impossible to fall into a longterm relationship while at war and because the evacuation of Bataan leaves Sandy behind, certain to die in the process.

This is where the title comes from, and where the most powerful scene in the movie is.  The war is not subtle about the "have's and have not's" of battle, with a large section of the film's middle devoted to the evacuation of General MacArthur into Australia while men around him perish to get him there.  The final scenes of the movie show that Brick & Rusty escape, but others, like Chief Mulcahey (Bond, who has a small part that is most notable for him crooning to Donna Reed through an open window...which he also more famously did in It's a Wonderful Life) are left to die.  Brick & Rusty are too valuable to the war effort to be left behind, even if the unmarried Rusty tries to switch with one of the married infantryman when there are not enough seats in the end of the movie.  It's a killer, rough ending particularly in an era where most WWII films were just populist propaganda, and on top of astounding cinematography and unreal visual effects, a really great forgotten epic.

The film was a critically-important one in the career of John Wayne, which I'd be remiss to not mention before we leave.  Wayne is the most famous WWII Hollywood draft dodger less because he was the only one to do it, and more because Wayne's onscreen persona frequently had him wearing a military uniform, thus making an odd juxtaposition to a man who never actually served.  This came to a head when director John Ford would berate Wayne, his longtime friend whom he thought a coward for skipping out on his patriotic duty, in front of the entire cast & crew of They Were Expendable.  Particularly when juxtaposed with his fellow leading man Robert Montgomery (who had been an ambulance driver at Dunkirk and rose to the level of lieutenant commander in the US Navy), Wayne made for easy mockery by Ford, and it took Montgomery eventually stepping in for the two men to finally make peace.  They would do so in the coming years alongside our star Ward Bond, who would make multiple movies with Ford & Wayne, one of which we'll discuss next week.

Big Jake (1971)

Film: Big Jake (1971)

Stars: John Wayne, Richard Boone, Maureen O'Hara, Patrick Wayne, Christopher Mitchum, Bobby Vinton

Director: George Sherman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Maureen O'Hara-click here to learn more about Ms. O'Hara (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Maureen O'Hara's career is too big to properly go across one month, and in hindsight, I should've realized that.  An actress where I'd seen most of her major films before this (which makes it harder to ground you in her career if you don't have the context of How Green Was My Valley or The Quiet Man), she might have been a better fit for a full summer or at least a month with five Saturday's (which May is, so I'm hoping you're enamored with our star, as she's with us for a while) as I think we kind of skipped over some of her leading lady work in the 40's.  It's possible that O'Hara is one of the rare actors we'll go back to in the future if the theme fits, as there's lots of room to bring back more of her pictures.  But for now, we're going to end her career in the early 1970's, when O'Hara retired from the industry (though not forever-more on that in a second).  O'Hara after her heyday in the 1940's & 50's attempted a number of second careers.  She tried a musical career (with limited success) and a theater career (with no success).  She found more success in the 1960's working in family-friendly films, most notably The Parent Trap, and she saw her career shift from the beautiful Irish maiden into a hip 1960's mother.  By 1971, though, she was tired of Hollywood, and it seems thought (at least for a time) the best way for her to exit the screen was opposite one of her most frequent leading men, John Wayne, in Big Jake.

(Spoilers Ahead) Set in the early 20th Century, Big Jake initially starts on Martha McCandles (O'Hara), a wealthy ranch owner working with her sons.  When the Fain Gang, led by John Fain (Boone) ransack the ranch, killing many of their employees & kidnapping Martha's grandson little Jacob (Ethan Wayne). Martha is told she must pay $1 million in ransom to get the boy back, and she asks her estranged husband Jake (John Wayne) "aka Big Jake"  to bring the ransom to the other men, accompanied by two of his sons James (Patrick Wayne) and Michael (Mitchum), both of whom have a fractured relationship with their father.  As the men hit the road, they start to bond, and it's revealed that Big Jack & Martha had no intention of paying the ransom (even though they could afford it), as they instead decided to kill the kidnappers/murderers who pillaged their farm.  The men eventually kill the kidnappers, with Big Jake meeting his grandson for the first time, and the McCandles family reunited, now ready to live together again.

The film doesn't break any new ground with the western format.  Wayne has played this part a hundred times (considering how many movies he'd made in his career, that might not even be an exaggeration), and O'Hara wasn't far behind him.  So your tolerance for this type of film relies on how much you're willing to overlook in Wayne's toxic masculinity universe (there is none of the nuance that he'd bring to The Searchers or Liberty Valance here), but I liked it.  I generally like Wayne's persona onscreen, even if it could get cartoonish, and he brings a rough charm to this role, and it's fun to see him play off of his real-life sons Patrick & Ethan.  O'Hara is only in this movie for a bit (she gets "and Maureen O'Hara" billing, which is always a crapshoot in terms of actual screen time), but she does well with the limited role.  At this point, she seems to understand the history that she brings just by standing onscreen or appearing opposite John Wayne in a movie, and she leans into it rather than trying to discourage it, letting the moviegoers fill in the blanks through past onscreen collaborations between the two...the script doesn't have to do all the work at this point.

O'Hara would retire from film after Big Jake.  Her offscreen commentary is frequently a bit prudish by modern standards (and bordering on the vain when it comes to describing her own work), as she thought Hollywood only made "dirty pictures" during this era.  Weirdly, though, O'Hara had a second act, and it was opposite someone you would have never guessed considering her leading men numbered icons Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, & Charles Laughton: Canadian comedian John Candy.  O'Hara loved playing his mother (she remarked he was one of her favorite leading men), and she got better reviews than the film did (I've never seen it, but I'm kind of surprised she didn't get more Oscar buzz in a similar fashion to Don Ameche, Jack Palance, & Lauren Bacall at the time, as it feels like that kind of role...anyone who has seen it weigh in in the comments).  O'Hara would eventually get her long-coveted Oscar, an Honorary trophy from the Academy in 2014; she would die less than a year later at the age of 95.

Rio Grande (1950)

Film: Rio Grande (1950)

Stars: John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Ben Johnson, Claude Jarman, Jr., Harry Carey, Jr., Chill Wills, J. Carrol Naish, Victor McLaglen

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Maureen O'Hara-click here to learn more about Ms. O'Hara (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are halfway through the month, and I'm going to confess something here.  While I am enjoying getting a Maureen O'Hara retrospective onto the blog (she had good taste in scripts, and occasionally made a big impression onscreen), she might have been a mistake for this kind of format (for two reasons).  The first is that Maureen O'Hara's career was too long to fit into four Saturday's, and I'm going to miss too many chapters with the actress.  After her work with Hunchback, she languished with abysmal parts at RKO, and only after she took on a key role in Fox's smash success How Green Was My Valley, did American films finally start using her properly.  The other problem, though, with O'Hara is that many of her biggest classics I've already seen, and the "rules" of this series are that I can only profile movies I've never seen, so I'm "discovering" the star along with you.  This means that we're going to skip How Green Was My Valley, Miracle on 34th Street, and The Quiet Man, all some of O'Hara's best work & the three films which she's most associated.  Today, though, we are going to look into a chapter of O'Hara's life that would come to define her career throughout the 1950's & 60's with a film I haven't seen-Rio Grande, her first film with director John Ford and actor John Wayne, both of whom she would work with consistently for the next twenty years.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is the third of Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy" and is about a troupe of US Cavalry who are stationed on the Texas frontier to guard against Apaches.  They are led by Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke (Wayne), whose son Jeff (Jarman) has been kicked out of West Point but still joins up as a private, and is assigned to his father's regimen.  While initially Jeff is mocked by his fellow soldiers (with them assuming he gets special treatment from his father), he is instead held to a higher standard, and they start to respect him.  Things become more tense when Kirby's estranged wife Kathleen (O'Hara) joins them, trying to convince Jeff to get out of the army as she fears for his safety, but she can convince neither father nor son, and she stays on, growing back in love with her husband.  The film's climax involves the Apaches stealing a number of children from the troupes, and them having to get back, with Jeff risking his life on the mission & Kirby being wounded, though not killed, during battle.  The film ends with Jeff receiving accommodation for his efforts (finally making his parents proud), and Kathleen & Kirby happily in love again.

The movie starred Wayne & O'Hara together for the first time, one of five times they'd make a movie together (they would later be remembered as one of the most beloved pairs in Classic Hollywood) and one of three films they made with director Ford.  While it has auspicious beginnings, the movie wasn't one that Ford really cared about.  The studio forced him to make the movie in order for him to secure the funding for The Quiet Man, which the studio (incorrectly) assumed would be a dud & they wanted the western as an insurance policy.  As a result, this is oftentimes the "odd man out" in Ford's Cavalry Trilogy, as the other two films (Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) are generally considered some of his masterpieces, a reputation Rio Grande doesn't enjoy.

Upon viewing, while there are elements to lend itself, this is correct & the movie doesn't number amongst the best of Ford's career.  The film's finest elements are its moody cinematography from Bert Glennon (making good use of Ford's obsession with Monument Valley, particularly in nighttime scenes), as well as the overuse of old songs; some criticized this at the time, but I quite liked the constant musical interludes where the troupes will sing army songs & love ballads to Kathleen.  The film's chemistry between Kirby & Kathleen is good, but underwritten.  While they have a tense backstory (Kathleen, a Southerner, watched as her husband burned down her plantation when he joined the North in the war), it's not particularly explored, and there are a lot of inconsistencies in their relationship.  It's one of those movies where you thank heavens for the chemistry as this could have been a clunker with actors who didn't work together.  But they do, and next week we'll see how well they interact as we explore one final chapter in O'Hara's epic career.

OVP: The Longest Day (1962)

Film: The Longest Day (1962)
Stars: John Wayne, Richard Todd, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Red Buttons, Peter Lawford, Eddie Albert, Jeffrey Hunter, Stuart Whitman, Rod Steiger, Leo Genn, George Segal, Paul Anka, Fabian, Roddy McDowall, Tommy Sands, Curd Jurgens, Frank Finlay, Sal Mineo, Richard Beymer, Robert Wagner, Alexander Knox, Edmond O'Brien, Mel Ferrer, Arletty
Director: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, & Bernhard Wicki
Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Art Direction, Editing, Cinematography*, Special Effects*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Does size matter?  That's the question looming over much of The Longest Day, our last film in a week dedicated to Best Editing nominees.  The Longest Day might well have deserved a nomination for least edited film, considering it clocks in at three hours long, and it's honestly very difficult to review, as we'll find below.  The film was gargantuan at the time, one as you see above that's filled with star cameos (we'll get into this in the review), and one that cost upwards of $8 million at the time, but earned that back 4x over to a sum of $30 million (the modern day equivalent of about $250 million, a blockbuster by any standard).  The movie is certainly big, and something to behold-the war film is realistic, frequently showing unfathomable aerial and maritime shots, and it's an achievement, without a doubt.  The question I kept coming back to as I watched the (VERY) long war movie is...is it any good?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told in a somewhat documentary style (at least by 1960's standards), with characters identified with name plates rather than more expositional dialogue, and focuses on the lead-up to D-Day.  The planning & battle are really the central characters in the movie; no character takes on the role of "lead" in the film, though certain actors like John Wayne & Robert Mitchum are in more of the movie than most of the cast-of-characters (today everyone would be marketed as a supporting actor here, but I suspect these two would've been lead if the film had scored acting nominations).  Again, especially in a pre-The Wild Bunch era, the film is merciless in its body count, even if the effect of the violence isn't what it would be in later war classics simply due to keeping the obvious bloodshed off screen.

For a three-hour movie, you'd expect a longer summary paragraph, but The Longest Day is unusual because it doesn't really have a proper narrative story.  The film's script is its weakest asset not just because there's no character development, but also because other than D-Day, there's no real story.  To a modern audience member, The Longest Day is weird because I don't have the "I lived through it" mentality that most people in 1962 would have of the sheer size & scope of D-Day (even if you weren't at Normandy at the time, most would've lived through the war, read about this in the newspaper, and heard from people they knew who were at Normandy).  As a result, you have to be a student-of-history to know a lot of the names flashing up onscreen, and while I knew some of them, I didn't know all, and with no character development or better grounding of the D-Day invasion's place in the war, the movie lacks a bit of context, and occasionally even purpose.

The star cameos by this point in the 1960's had become a recurring theme in epic films (look at Around the World in 80 Days or Pepe for other examples), and this would prove to be the biggest for this trend.  There are so many it becomes kind of like a game of "Where's Waldo" with certain faces.  You're like "oh, there's Mel Ferrer" or "I think that's Red Buttons," but the shocking thing about it is how many of these cameos are onscreen for mere seconds.  I had to rewind to confirm the Sean Connery scene, and Roddy McDowall's face is onscreen for roughly a minute.  This makes the movie one I'd theoretically re-watch just to confirm I caught all of the cameos, but it also means you aren't really emotionally-invested in the characters onscreen, just in awe of the cast.  It's too much-the film feels bloated and sort of a "so what" by the end of the picture.

And so I'm going with 2-stars here, which I honestly didn't think I would pick.  The Longest Day is very watchable, and the technical achievements are impressive.  The visual effects are glorious, extensive, and surely cost a fortune, particularly the aerial & maritime shoots.  Ditto the cinematography, which shot from the air, land, or sea is fascinating & beautiful-this is one of the last black-and-white films of the era to really capture a sense of majesty in the camerawork (it seems like most of the best cinematographers had moved to color photography by this era).  The editing is easy to mock because of the film's length, but it has extended longshots (also a nod to the cinematographer) on the beach that gave the film a smoother focus, and while you don't care about the characters, you're never bored-there's always "more, more, more" coming at you visually.  Best of the bunch is the art direction, meticulously recreating multiple battle scenes, war rooms, and seemingly a whole, destructed town.

But technical achievements, while novel at the time, don't make a strong movie, and in many ways this feels like Transformers or Armageddon with a better cast-it's large, advanced, and surely meant a lot at the time, but in retrospect it feels bloated, without any sense of passion, and is using the memory of one of the 20th Century's most important days to coast on not having anything to say.