John Wayne, The War Years

By Bill Kunkel

During his lifetime, John Wayne was never regarded as a great actor. That's because, ironically, his personal greatness was the primary limitation on his range as a thespian. Can you imagine John Wayne playing a criminal overlord, for example, or a contract killer? Of course not. In fact, the closest he came to a villainous role was his softened interpretation of Genghis Khan in the epic 1956 flop, The Conqueror.

The man who was born Marion Michael Morrison on May 26, 1907 evolved, over the course of nearly 200 films, into the legendary figure known as "The Duke." John Wayne could not, or would not, don a series of false beards and special make-ups in order to impersonate other people; he was, in fact, the antithesis of the traditional character actor. Like a musician limited to only five notes, or an artist working exclusively in primary colors, Marion Morrison spent his entire career reflecting the many facets of Duke Wayne, the near-mythic embodiment of America's self-image. He was cocksure, quiet, respected, slow to anger, but unbeatable once he committed to action. John Wayne was America. At least, he was a walking, talking representation of the country's self-perception in those days.

Wayne worked in a variety of genres, but is best remembered for his westerns and war movies. In the former, he explored the American strain of rugged individualism, that essential component of the pioneer spirit which could lead to redemption (True Grit), cynicism (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), or personal isolation (The Searchers). In his war movies, however, John Wayne personified America's courage and nobility, as well as the pain and responsibility of command.

Wayne had already made several dozen westerns before he appeared in his first war story. In fact, despite the commonly held belief that the Duke spent most of the early-Forties making movies to support the war effort, his first actual combat film was the Chinese-based WWII air combat drama, Flying Tigers (1942). His next war film, The Fighting Seabees (in which the Navy's Construction Battalion takes on the enemy in the Pacific), was produced two years later.

The Duke made only two other war movies during WWII, and both were released in 1945. Back to Bataan, directed by Edward Dmytryk, cast Wayne as an American officer organizing Filipino resistance forces to battle the Japanese. His second effort was an even finer film, John Ford's, They Were Expendable the gripping saga of PT boat crews in the Pacific during the early days of WWII (the Duke was actually billed second behind Robert Montgomery in this film).

Wayne didn't make another war movie until 1949, when he turned in what many fans consider his best work in the genre, playing a double-tough Marine top kick in The Sands of Iwo Jima. This Allan Dwan film became a WWII classic, and earned Duke Wayne his first Oscar nomination. Two years later, Wayne starred in a Nicholas Ray action film, Flying Leathernecks.

Wayne was hors de combat until 1957, when he starred in one of the stranger films in the annals of Hollywood history. Jet Pilot was an attempt by millionaire eccentric and aviation fanatic Howard Hughes to update his earlier film, Hell's Angels. (This big-budget silent film had got caught in the switches when talkies took over, and Hughes was forced to re-shoot all the non-flying scenes with sound--and it still made money!) Hughes exhumed Josef Von Sternberg to direct, and the entire film became a fiasco. In fact, in the tradition of Hell's Angels, Jet Pilot was completed in 1950 and went unreleased for seven years. The film is today considered a camp oddity, of historical note because future astronaut Chuck Yeager did some of the stunt flying.

Finally, in 1962, after all those years in the Pacific Theater, the Duke finally faced off against the Nazis in the star-studded tribute to the Normandy Invasion, The Longest Day. Considered one of the greatest war films ever made, the all-star cast included Rod Steiger, Robert Ryan, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Roddy McDowall , and Sean Connery--among many, many others.

Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way (1965), meanwhile, is one of those long, ponderous films that Preminger specialized in during the Sixties. It featured The Duke back in the Pacific as a Naval officer intent on capturing strategic islands during WWII.

The Duke made his last war movie in 1968. The Green Berets was Wayne's patriotic tribute to the legendary special forces operations in the Vietnam War and his swan song of war films. Wayne spent most of the remainder of his career in the saddle, where he was beyond criticism, and where he would finally win that elusive Oscar (for True Grit in 1969).

And that's a wrap, pilgrim.

Bill Kunkel is a Channel Manager for the Collecting Channel at http://www.collectingchannel.com.

The preceding material was written by Bill Kunkel. These are the opinions of the author, not the opinions of eBay, and therefore eBay does not validate the accuracy of or endorse these opinions.