pointing out Apache war smoke on the horizon, the fact is that John Wayne’s first appearance in a major Hollywood Western since The Big Trail entails him being relieved of his weaponry. 

Wayne is still in his innocent cowboy phase – good with a gun but naïve and inexperienced when it comes to the female sex. 

On the other hand, nobody watches a Wayne film for the romantic content – The Quiet Man an exception – but to watch him in action instead, and Stagecoach has more than enough of that to please even the most casual viewer. 

You could argue that the whole story of the stagecoach chase and ultimate rescue by the cavalry is a mere anti-climax to the final shootout between Ringo and his brother’s killers. 

On the way to Lordsburg the audience get everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them when it comes to the components of the Western genre. 

There’s corrupt bankers, Southern gentlemen gamblers, a drunk doctor (who still manages to deliver a baby without dropping it), smoke signals on the horizon, Indian chases, daring stunts, magnificent landscape, daring stunts – you name it and it’s all there on the screen. 

Throw in John Wayne as a gun-slinging sharpshooter and John Ford as director and you have an instant classic that no one can argue with.

So I won’t.

As I’m reviewing all of the films John Wayne starred in from Stagecoach all the way through to The Shootist, for the sake of completeness it’s only right that I include the four oaters he made for Republic after the release of Stagecoach. 

The Night Riders is the 5^th outing for Duke as Stoney Brooke in the ongoing saga of The Three Mesquiteers. 

All of the films in which he played Stoney were directed by George Sherman, who went on to direct the late career classic Western for the actor, Big Jake, over 30 years later.

The other two Mesquiteers are played by Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan as Tucson Smith and Max Terhune as Lullaby Joslin. 

I also note Tom Tyler in the cast, who played killer Luke Plummer in Stagecoach, settling for a part as a villainous enforcer. Coincidentally, he also inherited the role of Stony Brooke from Wayne after JW moved on to bigger things. 

Together, the Mesquiteers ride the range writing wrongs and basically punching the lights out of anyone who gets in their way. And they punch out a lot of lights. 

The movies, formulaic and utilising lots of stock footage, usually come in at about just under an hour so the action flows quick and fast and the storylines, by necessity, are fairly uncomplicated.

In The Night Riders, a crooked gambler disguises himself as a Spanish landowner, ominously referred to as the Don, misappropriates a whole passel’ of land from the rightful owners. 

He then imposes a tax on the homesteaders and therein lies the conflict that brings our heroes into the frame, on account of their ranch is also on the disputed land. 

The settlers are forced to give up their homes for not paying the tax imposed by the false Spaniard. If you wanted some kind of cultural reference for the film you might argue it invokes the plight of the farmers during the great depression of the 1930s – but I’m not sure you could apply that kind of social conscience subtext to this movie.

Now I’m getting confused. 

We know that the previous Mesquiteer film is set in the 1880s on account of the presence of the ill-fated President Garfield, who was assassinated in 1881. 

If that’s the case, how come the circus audience in this film look as though they’re dressed in what looks like 1930s garb, and not the latter part of the 19th Century?

 I also spotted a gramophone playing a vinyl recording of The Blue Danube, a telephone and a motorised jeep with caterpillar tracks that is used to haul a racing horse to the local track heavily populated by race goers dressed in 20th century business suits. 

After someone refers to a jitterbug contest I decided to just give up and go with the flow - it was easier that way.

The basic story involves a crooked circus manager who contrives to close a travelling circus run by his boss, Nancy. 

She owns a ranch that’s worth a lot of money, and the business manager intends to get his hands on that ranch through any means necessary, devious or otherwise. 

When the circus goes bust – cue a fairly impressive montage sequence worthy of Eisenstein when the big tent catches fire – the now unemployed Nancy returns to her ranch but mistakenly goes to the home of The Three Mesquiteers, who own the 3 – M ranch. 

Her place is called the W – E ranch but the sign is upside down – stay with me here - and she mistakes the W – E ranch for the 3 – M ranch. Got it? 

Apart from the fact that the Mesquiteers nearly lose their ranch – Stony Brooke becomes Stoney Broke - that’s about all of the plot I’m prepared to go into.

Nancy is accompanied, amongst others, by a large gorilla and a midget. To try and distract said gorilla after it picks him up, the increasingly tiresome Lullaby pulls the old ventriloquism act to frighten his attacker. 

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Republic, Dir: George Sherman, b/w, 56m
Cast: John Wayne, Ray Corrigan, Raymond Hatton, Don Barry,
Charles Middleton, Yakima Canutt

Good new, pardners. 

Someone at Republic Studios saw the light and dropped Lullaby Joslin, the weird one with the wooden dummy, and replaced him with Raymond Hatton as Rusty Joslin. 

Not only that but Wyoming Outlaw is a far cry from the previous Mesquiteer vehicles I’ve seen so far. 

You get the usual punch ups, misguided intentions and hammy acting, but this time around the violence is real and people don’t get to dodge the bullets as before. 

It’s as though someone with a sense of reality and social commitment has been let loose on the script, and the end result is an entertainingly adult B-Western with not one wooden dummy to be seen.

The bad news is that the timeline between each film is still a bit skewed. 

This time we’re in 1918 and apparently the Mesquiteers and their fellow cowherders were not aware America had entered the First World War. 

Hiding from a huge dust storm, Stoney finds a conveniently placed newspaper that provides a little bit of social history for the audience as regards the reason for the storm.

 It seems it’s the result of the land being farmed specifically to provide wheat during the war. Once the war ended the price of wheat fell and most of the farmers were bankrupted, a situation not even the Mesquiteers could sort out.

Chancing upon the daughter of a dirt poor farming family, the Mesquiteers try and help as best they can but the girl’s brother, Ray Parker, ends up in trouble with the law when he insists on hunting protected game to feed his family. 

Parker, played very convincingly by Don ‘Red’ Barry, points out that ‘the right to eat should come before the right of game to live’. ‘Sounds like pretty good sense’, agrees Stoney. So. Not a film for animal rights campaigners then.

Once the story starts rolling then the Mesquiteers don’t really feature that much.

They’re depicted more as bystanders in a situation that this time is taken out of

In this one, the threesome are now located in the year 1925, fifty years after the

end of the American Civil War.

I still find the hermetically sealed world of these films difficult to get to grips with but when this kind of wild entertainment is on offer, who can resist? 

Not so much Westerns, more of an early version of the TV classic series The Time Tunnel. Where will they end up next?

When the valley of New Hope is threatened by the construction of a dam which will turn the land into a reservoir, the townsfolk decide to fight back. 

The constructor tasked with building the dam threatens those who oppose it, only to be told by Duke to ‘take it easy. You don’t know the kind of people you’re dealin’ with, mister’. 

The leader of the town declares that ‘None of them high-priced lawyers are gonna’ take our homes away from us’ and proves to be as good as his word, rallying the other inhabitants to take on the thugs who try to violently push the project through.

So far so good, but just when I’m thinking this is the story of the little guy – or ‘mule-headed hicks’ as they’re referred to - facing off against the tyranny of so-called progress, that old devil called corruption rears its ugly head once more. 

The suits fool the townsfolk with a phony land deal by promising to build a pipeline that will irrigate their new town if they give up their rights to New Hope, and they fall for it, like the hicks that they are.

The climax takes part on what looks to me very much like a working dam. 

I’m assuming it was actually a real one as I just can’t see Republic paying for the new construction of a proper dam purely for a Western B-movie that runs for less than an hour. 

Also, I kept thinking that I vaguely recognised the actress playing the grand daughter of the town patriarch. 

Upon further investigation it turned out to be Jennifer Jones, famous for her portrayal in 1946 of Pearl Chavez, the dusky maiden in Duel in the Sun, or Lust in

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RKO, Dir: William A. Zeiter, b/w, 81m
Cast: Claire Trevor, John Wayne, George Sanders, Brian
Donlevy, Wilfrid Lawson, Chill Wills

Okay, so let me make sure I’ve got this right. Gabby Hayes is a travelling dentist who employs John Wayne to start an argument with anyone who crosses his path, after which JW then punches them in the mouth in order that they are then forced to seek dental help from the aforementioned Mr Hayes. 

I see there are four writers associated with this film, which doesn’t usually bode well for any movie, and already it hasn’t got off to a good start. 

Mind you, I think this is the first time I’ve ever been able to understand every word Gabby Hayes says, so let’s be thankful for small mercies.

Set in Kansas a year before the outbreak of the American Civil War, there’s a huge dollop of overt patriotic sentiment running through this film. 

First off JW, playing a likeable character called Bob Seton, nearly has an early ‘Republic. I like the sound of the word’ moment when he hears schoolchildren singing ‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee’, then stepping in to protect someone from an angry crowd with the words ‘If a man’s born in this country he has rights’, something JW obviously forgot himself when he helped to run Carl Foreman out of town in the early fifties, but I’m going to keep my powder dry on that subject for when I get to check out Big Jim McLain.

Moving swiftly on, it’s reunion time for JW in this one, working with the star of the film, Claire Trevor, for the third time – they’ll meet up again a few years later in The High and the Mighty. 

There’s also stalwart Gabby Hayes and The Big Trail director, Raoul Walsh. 

What’s interesting to see for all of us cowboy fans though, is the pairing of Wayne with Roy Rogers who plays Trevor’s brother. It’s intriguing to see Rogers eschew his well-known cowboy persona and do a bit of quite impressive acting for once.

Duke thinks about doing a bit of gunrunning but wisely sidesteps that profession and runs for town Marshal instead, which he wins. 

His opponent, Will Cantrall (Cantrell / Quantrill – geddit?), played by Walter Pidgeon, decides in a fit of pique to avenge his defeat by setting the whole country

ablaze, which is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me, but the die is cast. 

Charles Coburn and Sigrid Gurie play father and daughter refugees from Nazi occupied Vienna who are hired by Wayne, as farmer’s organizer John Philips, to work as doctors in a mid-Western dust bowl town.

Philips learns that the land is going to be declared barren and that the whole town is going to have to uproot and move to better farming land 1500 miles away in Oregon. 

JW gives a stirring speech to those farmers who wish to stay and battle it out with the elements:

‘Everyone of us has been served by a dispossessed notice, not by Uncle Sam or a bank or some mortgage company, but by a little gal we’ve been kicking in the teeth – mother nature’.

Prophetic words indeed. Makes you think that if Wayne were alive today he’d be supporting Al Gore and the climate change lobby when it come to saving the planet. 

Then you sober up and realise drink makes you say stupid things sometimes.

The moral is: if the couple from Vienna can find a new home elsewhere, then so can Wayne and his farmer friends. Then it rains. 

Leni asks if the rain will ‘save our land’. JW bestows a big smacker on her lips –a reward for showing she’s now fully integrated into American society. Then they plan to marry. 

Then a letter arrives telling Leni that Eric, her fiancé, who she thought was dead, is still alive and plans to come to America and marry her. 

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The Long Voyage Home 1940

Argosy Pictures, Dir: John Ford, b/w, 105m
Cast: John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Barry Fitzgerald, Wilfrid 
Lawson, Ian Hunter, Ward Bond

I was surprised to see Wayne top-billed in this, his second film for Ford, based

upon the writings of Eugene O’Neill. 

His position in the credits of the films he made in the early 40s still fluctuated between star and co-star and, seeing as The Long Voyage Home is really an ensemble piece, I was expecting him to be lower down the cast. 

John Wayne plays Swede Olsen, a somewhat naïve merchant seaman aboard a ship bound for England during the early years of WWII. 

Duke attempts a Swedish accent in this one, which is probably why he didn’t try a German accent in The Sea Chase. Pity. I reckon he’d have sounded great.

Cinematographer Greg Toland shares the screen with Ford’s name in the opening credits, his innovative deep focus compositions in both Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home for Ford further explored by Toland a couple of years later in Citizen Kane. 

Staunch Ford stock company members such as Barry Fitzgerald, Thomas Mitchell, Ward Bond, Mildred Natwick and John Qualen are all present and correct, along with British actors Ian Hunter and Wilfrid Lawson, playing respectively a mysteriously broody member of the crew and the ships captain. 

Wayne’s character is foregrounded more towards the end when he nearly ends up being shanghaied by an unscrupulous shipping agent and press-ganged for another ship. 

His compatriots rescue him and he manages to get safely back to meet his family in Sweden.

Some of the characters come to a sticky end, with Ward Bond copping it early on and Ian Hunter getting shot to pieces by an enemy fighter plane that attacks the ship, which is transporting explosives to England. 

Thomas Mitchell is press-ganged on to another ship which is torpedoed and goes down with all hands. So, not exactly a barrel of laughs, but then there aren’t that many John Ford films with a happy ending anyway.

The fact that Ian Hunter’s character turns out to have been an alcoholic who has left the Navy and his family in disgrace brings home how much the theme of drink

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Seven Sinners 1940

Universal, Dir: Tay Garnett, b/w, 87m
Cast:  Marlene Dietrich, John Wayne, Broderick 
Crawford, Anna Lee, Mischa Auer, Albert Dekker

Categorised as a comedy drama romance, this is the first of three films in which

Wayne starred opposite Marlene Dietrich, who plays a torch singer improbably named Bijou Franche.

Duke is a Naval officer, Dan Brent, who just as naturally falls for her onscreen as Wayne did off screen, so this part wasn’t going to be too much of a stretch for him.

The film starts slightly differently than normal, with a small pre-credit sequence in which a rowdy nightclub crowd call out for Bijou before a fight erupts over which the credits are then shown.

Apparently Bijou can incite riots purely by her appearance so she is deported along with Broderick Crawford, here playing a mouth-breathing lummox called Little Ned who follows her around like an overeager puppy. 

The whole ‘she’s always causing a riot’ thing could so easily be resolved if someone were to take Little Ned out into a field and shoot him in the back of the head, seeing as he’s the one who appears to initiate the fighting a lot of the time, but then of course we’d have no film to watch, so logic, as usual, must go out the window.

Bijou Blanche ends up on the island of Boni-Komba – I don’t understand a word I’m writing here - and takes up residence in the Seven Sinners nightclub, where she wows the local naval contingent, including Duke of course. 

There’s quite a nice little supporting cast at work here including John Ford regular Anna Lee, Oskar Homolka, Albert Dekker, Mischa Auer and Billy Gilbert. 

By the half hour mark Wayne has only had about 2 minutes of screen time so this is obviously a Dietrich rather than a JW vehicle. 

We get a couple of musical numbers, one in which Dietrich indulges her onscreen penchant for cross-dressing, this time as a navy officer, but no kissing the girls in the audience, as she famously did in Morocco. 

Marlene’s costumes grow ever more bizarre as the film progresses, one in particular making her look like an overgrown tree. 

Dietrich gets to sing the old classic ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love’, which is used as a constant theme throughout the film, but is hijacked from the earlier

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A Man Betrayed 1941 (UK title Citadel of Crime, TV title Wheel of Fortune)

Republic, Dir: John H. Aeur, b/w, 82m
Cast:  John Wayne, Frances Dee, Wallace Ford, Edward 
Ellis, Ward Bond, Harold Guber

This starts off quite promisingly with a distinctive noirish atmosphere. 

There’s lots of rain and darkness then the sudden death of young Johnny Smith

from Spring Valley, who it turns out has been shot whilst gambling in the Club Inferno. 

The script is quite smart at times – a business card for the Club Inferno proclaims, ’40 beautiful girls, 39 beautiful costumes’ - but the film vacillates between moody melodrama and clunky comedy and ends up somewhere in between.

It’s a contemporary story with rube lawyer Lynn Hollister, Wayne’s character, coming all the way into the big city from Spring Valley to find out who killed his friend Johnny. 

The official verdict is suicide but, wouldn’t you know it, the local politicians are a bunch of corrupt shysters working hand-in-hand with the gangsters that run the Club Inferno.

What makes this film an interesting watch is the casting of Frances Dee as the corrupt politician’s daughter and eventual love interest of Mr Wayne. 

She was herself played by Jessica Lange in the 1982 biopic Frances, for which Lange was nominated as Best Actress. 

It turned out that Miss Dee suffered mental issues due to an overbearing mother and a love affair with the bottle. None of this shows on the screen which I guess indicates she was quite a good actress given the chance. 

We also get to see Ward Bond channelling his inner Lenny Small (Of Mice and Men) as a rather creepy gangster who insists on invading the social space of Miss Dee more than she would like.

At some point in the proceedings Wayne gets involved with the political party headed by Dee’s corrupt father, Boss Cameron, and ends up delivering a speech on the radio. 

I was waiting for ‘Republic. I like the sound of the word’ but I’m guessing Duke’s political leanings were not so obvious back in 1942.

I liked the fact that Boss Cameron loves model railways, which should have given me a clue as to how the film was going to end. 

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The Shepherd of the Hills 1941

Paramount, Dir: Henry Hathaway, colour, 98m
Cast: John Wayne, Harry Carey Snr., Betty Field, Beulah
Bondi, Ward Bond, John Qualen

I taped this on VHS from TV years ago but for some reason just never got around

to actually watching it. 

Maybe the title put me off, I don’t know, but having viewed it for the first time I have to say I missed out on a pretty good movie. 

It’s more of an adventure film than an out-and-out Western, set in the Ozark Mountains round about the early 1900s. 

On first sight you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking this is a John Ford movie. John Wayne, Ward Bond, John Qualen and even Harry Carey Senior - all present and correct. 

Conversing with the dead at the graveside – check. 

Minimal camera movement – check. 

A paean to the poor and dispossessed – check. 

But it’s not a Ford film, it’s directed by Henry Hathaway of Katie Elder / True Grit fame. 

Like a lot of good Western directors, Hathaway gives the landscape a chance to shine on the screen. It’s beautifully shot on location in and around San Bernadino National Forest, and also happens to be Duke’s first film in colour.

Wayne, as mountain bootlegger Matt Mathews, hardly figures at all at the beginning of the film. He turns up occasionally for a few moments in the first half hour to show he’s in mean and ornery mode, clipping feisty mountain gal Sammy Lane, played by Betty Field, around the earhole for sassin’ off at the mouth about JWs dead mother. 

In truth, the film really belongs to Harry Carey, as Daniel Howitt, the shepherd of the title. Carey is a mysterious stranger who turns up wanting to buy land in the vicinity. 

It’s hard to understand why he would even consider living there considering how mean and surly everyone he meets seems to be, but then it’s obvious there’s more to the story of the shepherd than meets the eye.

Sammy is the first one to figure out – apart from me and everyone else on the

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Lady For A Night 1942

Republic, Dir: Leigh Jason, b/w, 87m
Cast:  Joan Blondell, John Wayne, Ray Middleton, Philip Merrivale,
Blanche Yurka, Montagu Love

I have no insight or background knowledge as to why John Wayne stayed faithful to Republic Studios for so long. 

I can only assume head of the studio Herbert Yates had a handful of negatives that showed his star indulging in something so unwholesome Wayne was kept chained up for nearly twenty years churning out pieces of fluff such as this. 

Like a lot of his previous Republic films, yet again he is not the main star of the film. 

That honour falls to Joan Blondell, playing Jenny Blake, owner of the steamboat Memphis Belle – the name of which was adopted for the famous WWII American bomber – who strives to be accepted in polite society. 

Wayne is Jack Morgan, a gambler and reprobate who tries to help Blondell further her social ambitions. 

The movie is supposedly set in Memphis in the 1880s but it looks like a collection of outtakes from Lady of Louisiana, complete with Ray Middleton performing a less villainous reprisal of his earlier role, a whole host of props and costumes that featured in that film as well and a slew of black actors competing with each other to deliver the most hackneyed stereotypical African American characters possible.

The basic plot concerns Blondell’s efforts to be accepted by her betters to the point where she rashly marries Middleton, who has no money but does have some social standing. 

Maybe if Wayne hadn’t kept calling her ‘baby’ like some cheap gangster she would have seen the error of her ways and married him instead, but that’s what comes of casting JW against type.

Blondell doesn’t realise it but she’s married into a high society version of the Addams family, complete with a creepy sister modelled on Miss Haversham from Great Expectations and an older and murderous sister carved from the same mould as Mrs Danvers from Rebecca. 

I’m detecting a bit of a common theme that runs throughout some of the Wayne / Republic early 1940s films in which everything tends to be tidied up and explained

As with Seven Sinners, the main star of the film is Marlene Dietrich, playing a saloon owner Cherry Malotte. 

JW is third down the cast in a film that occupies much the same territory and story as North to Alaska. It is also infinitely better than the later Wayne vehicle, with just the right mixture of humour and drama in equal balance, without the need for over-the-top broad comedy that mars so much of North to Alaska. 

Wayne’s a bit of a heel in this one, playing off one woman against the other, which gives the even more villainous Randolph Scott, as a fraudulent gold commissioner, a chance to make a play for Marlene’s Cherry. Now there’s a double-entendre if ever I heard one.

Harry Carey gets the thankless role of Wayne’s sidekick but it’s good to see the pair of them sharing the screen together a year after they co-starred in The Shepherd of the Hills. 

At least Carey doesn’t get to shoot Duke this time. I’m still trying to get over that one myself. An ill-advised sequence in which JW, Carey and a couple of other gold miners black up in order to steal back their own money might make not make the cut in our more enlightened times. 

What with Wayne and Carey upping the ante by performing a short Black and White Minstrel African American comedy double act (possibly based on the popular Amos and Andy radio show of the time), this will probably have the easily offended liberal middle class audiences of today choking on their ethically sourced skinny latte’s.

The title of the film by the way refers to the imposters, lead by Randolph Scott, who arrive in town to defraud the population. Although Wayne is not the main star he gets more screen time than Scott, whose acting style on display in this film is rather more animated than the one he adopts in his later Westerns. 

On the evidence here, It’s a pity the two of them didn’t team up more often later on

in their respective careers.

The highlight of the film is a quite brutal saloon brawl between Wayne and Scott which by my reckoning runs for about three and a half minutes. 

It would have run longer but some scenes are speeded up in order to make the action appear faster than it actually is, which only serves to introduce a comedic element to the sequence as a whole.

 I’ve heard mention that JW did some of his own stunts in the fight and if you look closely you’ll see it’s actually him being bodily pushed through the glass window of the saloon just before the fight finishes. 

In the overhead shots it’s obviously a couple of stunt men slugging it out whilst Scott and Wayne feature in the close ups. 

A statuesque Marlene Dietrich watches from the balcony above at the mayhem below whilst sporting a heavily coiffed mountain of hair carefully balanced on her beautiful bonce. As punch ups go, it’s pretty good, and of course our boy wins outright.

There’s quite a spectacular train crash towards the end of the film, featuring a shot in which the locomotive heads straight towards the camera. The crash itself appears to feature a full-scale train so I’m not sure how they made the shot of the train careering into the camera unless I’m mistaken and they used models all along. 

Either way, this sequence is very impressive and the film as a whole is sterling example of good old-fashioned 1940s Wayne Western fare.

I swear John Wayne is wearing exactly the same getup of top hat and fancy suit here that he wore in Lady From Louisiana. 

Or was it Lady For a Night? One of those Republic lady films anyway. 

It seems the studio was so cheap it just recycled the costumes then built some flimsy story to suit the suit, if you get my drift. 

And boy, is this one flimsy. 

I’m finding it very hard to actually type the words ‘John Wayne plays a modest pharmacist’ without losing the will to live.

 I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - Duke belongs on a horse, tall in the saddle, mean and ornery, punching, fightin’ and a shootin’ his way through a whole passel of pesky Injuns / dangerous outlaws / wily land grabbers / despicable corrupt businessmen (delete that which is not applicable), not playing a bloody pill-peddling chemist like he does here. 

And another thing. Wayne lets someone hit him and he doesn’t even thump the guy back. I mean – what tha? To top it all off he plays a character called Tom Craig, which is probably one of the most boringly innocuous and nondescript named roles he’s ever portrayed.

Duke falls foul of fraudster Albert Dekker who extorts protection money from innocent land owners. 

Along the way he befriends Dekker’s saloon singer fiancé, played by Binnie Barnes, who had only four years on Wayne but here looks like she puts the old in the old West. 

The position of ubiquitous JW sidekick falls to Edgar Kennedy. Just to show how ineffective Wayne is as a fighting hero in this film, the townspeople try to lynch him after mistakenly thinking he’s poisoned the local drunk with tainted medicine – I’m sorry but you’ll have to check the film out yourself if you want the backstory to this.

 Instead of punching his way out of the situation, Wayne is saved only after the crowd are distracted by a miner riding into town declaring there’s gold in them thar hills.
 

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Pittsburgh 1942

Universal, Dir: Lewis Seiler, b/w, 91m
Cast:  Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Frank Craven, Thomas Gomez, Paul Fix

Not the best of the Dietrich / Wayne trilogy of films – that honour belongs to The Spoilers – it’s also not that engaging either. 

Even Randolph Scott in the cast doesn’t help lift this one above mere curiosity value. 

It’s a strange concoction of WWII propaganda film joined up with a coal mining story that tells in flashback the story of two successful industrialists – Scott and Wayne – who start out as lowly paid miners. 

It’s a bit of a heavy handed saga as the fortunes of JW, as Pittsburgh Markham, waxes and Waynes – sorry about that. 

It’s also unintentionally hilarious, especially the early sequence in which Dietrich, dressed to the nines as usual, helps to lift a huge wooden beam in a mine cave-in.

It turns out she’s from a coal mining community as well, which is even more risible in a way. 

The script’s not that hot either. 

Sample line from Wayne to Dietrich: “I’m your kinda guy, see, and you’re my kinda gal. We were cut from the same chunk.” I’m assuming by chunk he means chunk of coal but it could just as equally be an example of 1940s script hep talk that I have yet to become acquainted with. 

And another thing. Should Randolph Scott really be smoking a cigarette in the middle of a laboratory surrounded by God knows how many combustible solutions? 

Didn’t they have health and safety back then, or was that invented just to get up everybody’s nose in today's world?

I also detect a slight whiff of socialism in the script, what with Wayne’s character arguing that if Scott sets up business with him they’ll be able to pay workers a living wage and provide medical care. 

Wayne’s back to heel country again, as in The Spoilers, this time using everyone around him, including Scott and Dietrich, to further his own ambitions.  

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A Lady Takes A Chance 1943

RKO, Dir: William A. Seiter, b/w, 86m
Cast:  Jean Arthur, John Wayne, Charles Winninger, Phil Silvers, Mary Field, Don Costello

I have to admit this isn’t a JW film that’s ever touched upon my consciousness at all. 

In other words I’d never heard of it until recently. You can tell just by the opening music and the declaration of ‘Once upon a time’ on a title card that we’re going to the land of romantic comedy with this one. 

To be more specific we’re in Cowboy and the Lady territory, only instead of Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon we get JW and Jean Arthur. 

Duke plays a rodeo rider called – who else? – Duke. Jean Arthur as Mollie decides to take a bus trip out West to get a flavour of the place, as young women back in the 1940s were wont to do, and immediately falls for the first cowboy to be thrown from a horse and land in her lap. We can all guess who that cowboy is.

The film gets off to a lively start with Phil Silvers in early Bilko mode as a bus driver but it’s no more than a cameo, which is a shame. A bit more Silvers and this film could have been genuinely funny.

Although I have to admit the sight of Wayne wearing a kitchen apron is slightly amusing.

Duke’s a bit of a lady’s man and marriageaphobic to boot, whilst Mollie is strictly a ‘one-man at a time’ woman so they don’t exactly hit it off straightaway, until she brings Duke some luck at the gambling table. 

Along the way we’re treated to a meticulously choreographed comedy bar room brawl and plenty of stock film footage of real rodeo riders in action. Not too sure how JW was helping out the war effort with this concoction but maybe he churned out one for himself every now and then.

The character of Mollie comes across as a bit of an air-head if truth be told, what with having an imaginary horse called Gwendoline with ‘eyes as big as hamburgers’. 

I’m guessing that what with a lot of scriptwriters unavailable due to the inconvenience of Word War II, the studios resorted to employing drug addicts in their stead. 

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In Old Oklahoma / War of the Wildcats 1943

Republic, Dir: Albert S. Rogell, b/w, 102m
Cast:  John Wayne, Martha Scott, Albert Dekker, George 'Gabby' Hayes, Dale Evans, Paul Fix 

I don’t usually comment that much on the style or aesthetic content of these John Wayne 1940s Republic films, so when you get an opening sequence in one take that runs for over two minutes, you tend to sit up and take notice. 

It starts under the credits with the camera presenting a panorama of characters on a train discussing ‘oil in them thar hills’ as a ticket conductor makes his way through the carriages. 

After that it’s business as usual filmmaking wise.

Martha Scott plays Catherine Allen, school teacher turned authoress – with very bad dress sense. The costume she wears at the beginning possess shoulder pads so ludicrously high she looks like she’s about to flap her wings and go join the nearest bat colony.

 Ms Allen has written a racy romantic novel called A Woman Dares for which she is being literally railroaded out of town, similar to Claire Trevor’s banishment from Tonto at the beginning of Stagecoach. 

She disparages the menfolk on the train for not giving up a seat on the train for her, to which comes the reply ‘This is the twentieth century remember? When women stand on their own two feet.’ Nice to see feminism getting an airing even if it’s the butt of a joke. 

The villain – Albert Dekker (again) - as a wily oil businessman in the mould of JR called Jim “Hunk” Gardner, labels Scott a ‘wildcat’ which might presumably explain the change in title when the film was re-released. 

Into the middle of all of this stumbles Duke, thankfully dressed in cowboy garb, even if the film is apparently set in 1906. Good to see Gabby Hayes back in the sidekick saddle, spluttering dialogue like ‘consarn that noisesome gasoline guzzling monster’ (I think that’s what he said anyway) when confronted with the future that is the automobile.

He also utters the immortal words ‘Say, legs is pretty things, ain’t they?’ when confronted with the past that is a dancing saloon girl.   

Wayne sings in the bath a song called Pretty Redwing. I knew the minute I heard it

that he also sang this song in another film. According to my research it’s either The Comancheros or McKlintock! 

There’s also a musical saloon number featuring Dale Evans, the future Mrs Roy Rogers, as the promisingly named Cuddles Walker. 

Unfortunately it’s her only scene in the film which is a bit of a shame as she looks kind of cute. Damned sight better looking than Trigger anyway. 

The improbable romance between Dekker and Catherine turns out to be just that. After all, when you have to choose between an oily millionaire oilman like Dekker or Duke warbling Pretty Redwing at the drop of a ten-gallon hat then there’s no contest. 

The main thrust of the story is that Dekker is out to steal the oil rich land from Chief Big Tree, only to be eventually thwarted by JW and Gabby Hayes, the Batman and Robin of the prairie.

All that’s needed is a bout of the usual fisticuffs to settle the whole thing, Dekker and Duke squaring off in close-up whilst the long shots feature stunt men who look nothing like the actors they’re doubling for. In Wayne’s case, he’s too short and a bit chubby to boot.

So not really a cowboy film then, even if our hero gets to shoot a couple of right villains, and a spectacular climax in which he heads up a wagon train laden with oil that the dastardly Dekker is attempting to sabotage and put Wayne out of business. 

It is, though, an interesting mixture of various themes including the exploitation of Native Americans by the duplicitous white man, the passing of the West, the unacceptable face of capitalism as well as the nascent rise of feminism, the inclusion of this last subject not surprising seeing as the film was scripted by two women, Ethel Hill and Eleanor Griffin. 

Not exactly a JW classic but a pleasant Sunday afternoon-er that helps to pass the time.

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The Fighting Seabees 1944

Republic, Dir: Edward Ludwig, b/w, 100m
Cast:  John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Dennis O'Keefe, William Frawley, Grant Withers, Paul Fix

Another Republic release, this time from 1944, but not nearly as good as The

Flying Tigers. I remember watching this film as a kid and thinking it was full of action, but having watched it again recently there’s really only two fighting sequences in the whole of the film, and it takes nearly 30 minutes before the first shot is fired in battle. 

The story revolves around a group of construction workers who are restricted from taking up arms to defend themselves when the going gets tough, as they’re still classed as civilians, even though they’re building infrastructure for the army and navy in battle conditions. 

Step forward construction boss Wedge Donovan, played by Wayne, who fights for the rights of his workers to take on the Japanese.

If that was just the main thrust of the story then there might have been room for more action but the film is stumped by a strange love triangle between Wayne, war correspondent Susan Hayward and Hayward’s boyfriend, Dennis O’Keefe, who plays a navy Lieutenant, and is all for helping Wedge to get his men the right to bear arms. 

Hayward loves O’Keefe, then Wayne falls in love with Hayward, she falls in love with Wayne, Wayne realises he’s a heel for stealing O’Keefe’s girl, drops Hayward, then goes off and gets himself killed in the climactic battle with the Japanese. 

I think the only reason Hayward then finally tells O’Keefe that she still loves him is because out of the two men, O’Keefe is the only one still standing. 

Either way the whole love story plot just gets in the way of what could have been a really good WWII film, particularly as the story of the Seabees is based around the real-life WWII Navy Construction Battalions.

Like Flying Tigers, the film is obviously a low-budget propaganda affair with lots of back projection and use of stock footage. 

There’s even a guest appearance by one of the Japanese pilots from the previous film just to make you feel at home. If possible the Japanese are even more merciless and callous – and uglier - than in The Flying Tigers, grinning manically as they shoot yet another character actor in the back. 

This film would also most definitely fall foul of today's political correctness, the enemy at one point referred to as ‘bug-eyed baboons’. 

Wayne yet again engages in another suicidal mission, this time to push a tank of boiling oil onto the attacking Japanese soldiers and flush them out into the open where they can then be humanely mown down in their hundreds like the Oriental swine that they are. 

Wayne’s death scene happens very quickly – he’s shot in the chest whilst using a bulldozer to shift the oil tank – and comes as a bit of a shock, but he has to die in order for Susan Hayward to live unhappily ever after with Dennis O’Keefe once the war is over.

One scene that I would pay good money never to have to watch again is when, at a party sequence early on in the film, Wayne jitterbugs with a young lady who goes by the name of Twinkie Tucker - now there’s a name to conjure with. 

He is not a dancer, any more than he was a singer in his 1930s Republic cowboy films. 

I guess it’s an example of the studio trying to get down with the kids by having Wayne engage in the terpsichorean shenanigans of the contemporary young – by my estimate he must have been at least 36 years old when the film was made – but for me it’s still painful to watch. 

In the world of Hollywood war films there are two constants that can never be challenged. Charlie don’t surf, and Duke don’t dance. Enough said.

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Tall In The Saddle 1944

RKO, Dir: Edwin L. Marin, b/w, 87m
Cast:  John Wayne, Ella Raines, Ward Bond, George 'Gabby' Hayes, Audrey Long, Paul Fix

At last. A bona fide John Wayne Western, the first proper JW cowboy movie since

The Spoilers. 

I think I’m correct in saying that this is the last time Wayne worked with Gabby Hayes, the archetypal personification of the old-timer who spouted pure frontier gibberish, and was eventually consigned to the dust heap of cinematic history with the help of the Gabby Johnson character in Blazing Saddles. 

Hayes appeared with Wayne in approximately 8 films and this one is particularly prescient, with Wayne being told to watch out for Dave, played by Hayes, as ‘he’s a miserable old cuss’. Wayne replies that he likes ‘grumpy old cusses. Hope I live long enough to be one.’ Well, guess what, Duke. Judging by films such as Cahill US Marshal, Big Jake and True Grit I’d say your wish actually actually came true.

Despite being a fairly low-budget RKO production this film still has its moments, although I must confess I found the plot somewhat convoluted. 

The cast includes the ubiquitous Paul Fix and Ward Bond, both playing the villains of the piece. Wayne’s female co-star, Ella Raines, is a feisty young gun-totin’ easy-on-the-eye rootin-tootin’ frontier gal who’s ‘meaner than a skillet full of rattlesnakes’ and who – of course - eventually falls heavily for our hero. 

For a moment though it looks like Wayne will be immune to her charms with declarations such as ‘no woman is gonna get me hog-tied and branded’ and ‘I never feel sorry for anything that happens to a woman’. 

To my ears that last one sounds like a sentiment straight from a James Edward Grant script but he wasn’t on board for this one, unless he made an anonymous contribution to the script somewhere along the way.

The film starts out as a languid exercise in good old fashioned cattle rustling, but there’s a couple of set pieces I thought were particularly effective. 

There’s a saloon confrontation over a card game between an unarmed Wayne and a local idiot in which said idiot pulls a gun on Duke. JW calmly walks away up to his room then returns with a gun belt buckled around his waist.

 Wayne takes the pot of money he was being cheated out of as the card cheat bottles out and skedaddles. I also liked the confrontation between Duke and a drunken gun fighter in which Wayne informs his opponent ‘touch that gun and I’ll

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Flame Of Barbary Coast 1944

Republic, Dir: Joseph Kane, b/w, 91m
Cast:  John Wayne, Ann Dvorak, Joseph Schildkraut, William Frawley, Virginia Grey, Paul Fix

The version I watched proclaims prior to the credits that the UCLA Film Archives has provided the print, meaning someone thought this film worth preserving.

 Coupled with the fact that the screenplay is by Borden Chase, who contributed quite extensively to the James Stewart / Anthony Mann cycle of 1950s Westerns, initial hopes are high that this effort will not be as mundane as some of the other 1940s offerings from Wayne and Republic Studios. 

The story is set in San Francisco in the early 20th Century, so again not a real proper Western as far as I’m concerned. 

Ann Dvorak is Flaxen Tarry – who thinks these names up? – resident singer and flame of the Barbary gambling saloon. 

There’s also a strangely benign villain, Tito Morell, played by Joseph Schildkraut, who comes across as just a dirty old man who runs the saloon in order to savour the nocturnal delights of Flaxen and any other female that wanders across his plane of vision.

My first impression is that there’s too much singing and dancing – two full musical numbers occur in just the first 15 minutes of the film – and in my opinion Ann Dvorak can’t sing very well. 

Into the mix wanders Duke, playing yet another Duke, gambler Duke Ferguson this time around. 

He falls head over spurs for Miss Flaxen, indicating he’s both easily led and tone deaf into the bargain as well. 

Visiting the coast to collect a debt of $500 dollars, which by coincidence is owed to him by Morell, Duke goes on a gambling spree with Flaxen and ends up breaking the house in all of the gambling dens in town, including Morell’s. 

Duke celebrates his newfound riches by singing very loudly and almost, but not quite, putting Dvorak’s voice to shame. 

The aggrieved casino owners want to ‘give him the works’ but Morrell relieves a drunken Duke of all his winnings at cards instead. 

Seeing as this is only about half an hour in, Duke doesn’t resort to fisticuffs to resolve the situation. He goes back to his ranch in Montana and approaches the local gambling expert, Wolf Wylie, played by William Frawley, to help him get his money back. 

Frawley has quite an amusing take on his profession, stating that ‘a deck of cards is like a woman. Usually when you pick one up – you wish you hadn’t’. Nobody writes scripts like that these days. Not unless they’re prepared for a visit from the PC police.

The problem is that this film can’t make up its mind whether it’s a late era Western, a gambling Sting-type exercise or a political skulduggery melodrama.

The end result is that it’s none of the above, in fact it’s a bit of a mess. There’s hardly any action to speak of, with Duke finally getting to throw a punch at least one hour and six minutes into the film. 

Also, it’s the closest JW gets to appearing in a full-blown musical – I count at least 10 songs listed in the soundtrack on IMDB. 

The film was also nominated for its music score so I rest my case. I therefore regretfully conclude that, even with a low-budget recreation of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and a Borden Chase script – although the scene in which Flaxen calmly informs everyone she’s going to walk again after being paralysed and almost flattened in the earthquake is downright absurd.

Flame of the Barbary Coast never really sets itself alight. 

Too much singing and dancing – and not enough punching and stomping.

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Back To Bataan 1945

RKO, Dir: Edward Dmytryk, b/w, 95m
Cast:  John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, Beulah Bondi, Richard Loo, 

Philip  Ahn, Paul Fix

A change of studio for Wayne as this was produced by RKO, who look as though they had a bit more money to spend on the script. 

The film, released in May 1945, just a few weeks after VE Day, is directed by Edward Dmytryk, who a couple of years later fell victim to the anti-Communist witch hunts in Hollywood and ended up in jail for contempt. 

According to some sources Wayne and Dmytryk clashed towards the end of production over the director’s political leanings. 

Despite the conflict behind the camera, however, the end result is the best WWII movie Wayne appeared in up to that point.

Wayne is Colonel Joe Madden, tasked with rallying the resistance forces in the Philippines against the invading Japanese. 

The film begins with a march past the camera of some of the real-life American POWs who were held in captivity at the time the film was set in 1942, the idea being I guess to demonstrate the veracity of what follows. 

One of the main differences between this film and the previous two WWII movies Wayne appeared in for Republic is that he has no love interest to distract him from the task in the hand. 

That falls to his co-star, Anthony Quinn, here playing Zorba the Filipino Resistance Hero in much the same way as he eked out a career as Zorba the Circus Performer (La Strada), Zorba the Arab (Lawrence of Arabia and Zorba the Greek in, well… Zorba the Greek. 

Quinn’s girlfriend ostensibly collaborates with the occupying Japanese forces but in reality she’s a double agent.

This is quite a brutal film for its time, with summary executions of American POWs on a Japanese death march, the hanging of a teacher from a flagpole, the torture of a young Filipino boy, and Japanese soldiers being knifed and chopped to death.

 The version I watched recently appears to have been censored for some of its

violence, a few scenes looking as though they’ve been shortened to avoid upsetting the more sensitive viewer.

The Japanese themselves are now portrayed as real people as opposed to the sadistic nameless killers with no back story from Flying Tigers and The Fighting Seabees. They’re still sadistic killers of course but they do possess very nice table manners, so I guess that’s a start.

The film is more of a tribute to the Filipino resistance than it is to the American’s who fought in the Philippines, possibly because the war in the Philippines is maybe viewed in the same way as the British view Dunkirk: an honourable defeat, but a defeat nonetheless. 

Wayne still takes centre stage however, and in this one he gives good war, throwing himself with gusto into the action and machine-gunning and blowing up the enemy with the best of them. 

At one point he is blasted into the air by the force of a hand grenade, a stunt he obviously performed himself, proving how much he was prepared to suffer for his art.

One scene worth noting is when Wayne tells a young Filipino boy that ‘you’re the guy we’re fighting this war for”. This predates by 23 years the last line from The Green Berets, in which he tells a young Vietnamese boy of similar age that ‘you’re what this is all about”. Uncanny, or what? 

This is one Wayne WWII movie I’d gladly watch again. 

If you get the opportunity check out a film called Bataan, directed by Tay Garnett and released a couple of years before in 1943. That film deals with the events prior to Back to Bataan and together they make a great double bill.

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Dakota 1945

Republic, Dir: Joseph Kane, b/w, 82m
Cast:  John Wayne, Vera Ralston, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, Mike Mazurki, Paul Fix

Just as with Flame of the Barbary Coast I had high hopes for this film as well,

even more so considering it’s a rare 1940s Republic Studio JW offering – an actual Western. 

A few of the usual suspects are rounded up for this one, Paul Fix competing with Bruce Cabot for one of the most featured actors in JW films. 

There’s also Walter Brennan and Ford stock company members Mike Mazurki and Ward Bond. 

I note that the script is based on an original story by Carl Foreman. Due to his Communistic tendencies he was later banished from Hollywood, partly through the efforts of the Motion Picture Alliance which at the time was headed up by JW. It makes you wonder if that was payback for coming up with such a lousy story. 

In this one, John Wayne plays gambler John Devlin. Walter Brennan portrays – well, he portrays Walter Brennan really, a dad blasted ornery coot who also happens to be a steamboat captain. 

Brennan is as usual quite proficient when it comes to being dad blasted and ornery, after all that’s his default setting anyway, but he’s not exactly that hot when it comes to the actual piloting of a steamboat itself, running it aground before blowing it up. 

There’s also Nick Stewart as Nicodemus, a stereotypical lazy African American steamboat worker giving Stepin Fetchit a run for his money. 

Finally, Ona Munson, Wayne’s co-star in Lady from Louisiana, turns up in a bit part as a saloon dancer. How mighty are the fallen.

The film is set in the 1870s so it’s definitely a Western. We know that for a fact due to the presence of cavalry troops, stagecoaches, Injuns, saloons, land grabbers and characters dressed in typical cowboy garb. 

So why does it start as a comedy chase movie with Wayne eloping with his wife, played by Vera Ralston? And why does Ralston’s railroad magnate father and all of his friends talk with Eastern European accents? 

Is it because Ralston was Czechoslovakian which in turn meant that Republic Studio head Herbert Yates, embroiled in off screen horizontal shenanigans with

Miss Ralston at the time, insisted that she and her onscreen family all possess the same strangulated speech mannerisms? 

Not that I’m that interested but I guess we’ll never know.

The basic story is that Ward Bond and his cronies are set upon grabbing as much land as they can before the railroad arrives. 

Wayne’s wife is the daughter of the guy who’s going to be bringing the railroad to the territory so he and Ralston are both seen as competitors for the land. 

During the course of the film Miss Ralston gets shot in the shoulder which is bad luck for Vera but even unluckier for the audience, what with Ward Bond being such a lousy shot. 

The only thing worse than Ralston’s acting is the model work for the steamboat sequences which are pretty poor, even for a low-budget Republic vehicle such as this.

I actually can’t think of anything positive to say about this film, apart from the fact that it’s not very long. 

It clocks in at just under 80 minutes, proving yet again the veracity of the old adage that every cloud has a silver lining. 

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They Were Expendable 1946

MGM, Dir: John Ford, b/w, 135m
Cast:  Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed, Jack Holt, Ward Bond, Marshall Thompson

Despite Wayne being cast second in the bill to George Montgomery, this is the

first real classic WWII movie of his career.

It doesn’t hurt of course that it was directed by John Ford and the film, to my mind, is a small yet underrated masterpiece in the director’s body of work. 

Based on fact the film, released just after the end of the war by MGM, tells the story of two navy Lieutenants, John Brickley, played by Montgomery, and Rusty Ryan (Wayne), who are instrumental in using PT boats to attack the Japanese navy in defence of the Philippines. 

The film itself, like Wayne’s performance, is a subdued and somewhat melancholy affair, bearing in mind, as the title suggests, that most of the characters are dead by the time their story is told. 

Montgomery, unlike Wayne, had actually served during the war in the navy and commanded a PT boat in the Pacific. 

On top of that, Ford had also seen action with his photographic unit at Midway, in which he was mildly wounded by some shrapnel, and had also witnessed the D-Day landings. 

Ford apparently rode Wayne mercilessly for not having voluntarily enlisted himself, moving Montgomery to intervene on Wayne’s behalf and upbraiding Ford accordingly, which I think goes some way to explaining Wayne’s low-key performance in the film. 

He’s heroic enough of course, and he gets to indulge in a doomed love interest sub-plot with a nurse played by Donna Reed, but on balance I’d say this is more of a Ford film than it is a vehicle for Wayne.

Ford isn’t generally known for his action sequences, being more interested in character and mood. 

The battle between the PT boats and the Japanese fleet, however, is genuinely exciting and extremely authentic, no doubt helped by Ford and Montgomery having witnessed the real thing during the war itself. 

Wayne gets to survive this one, both he and Montgomery having to leave their men behind to help organise other PT boat missions on behalf of the navy. 

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Angel & The Badman 1947

Republic, Dir: James Edward Grant, b/w, 100m
Cast:  John Wayne, Gail Russell, Harry Carey Snr., Bruce Cabot, Irene Rich, Paul Fix

It starts quite well with the opening credits showing a chase sequence filmed

against the backdrop of Monument Valley. 

The score is by Richard Hageman who composed and arranged the soundtracks for Stagecoach and Fort Apache, so it’s fairly obvious we’re in Ford country – until we find out it’s written and directed by James Edward Grant, the man who eventually became Wayne’s go-to writer in the following years.  Not that I’m saying that counts against the film – after all Grant wrote or co-wrote The Comancheros and Donovan’s Reef, but then he was also involved in Big Jim McLain and The Barbarian and the Geisha – and I truly believe that if it wasn’t for Grant’s script then The Alamo would have been hailed as a genuinely great film.

It’s a great John Wayne movie, no doubt about it, but in my opinion the screenplay lets The Alamo down quite badly.

Duke is in easy-going and congenial mode here as the injured outlaw Quirt Evans, nursed back to health by a Quaker family, and in particular by their daughter, played by Gail Russell, who can’t help falling for Wayne. 

It occurred to me as I watched it that the film has quite a lot in common with the Harrison Ford movie, Witness, which has almost the same plot. Wayne / Ford, Quaker / Amish, Gail Russell / Kelly McGillis, it’s all there if you look for it. 

There’s even a shootout at the end of both films, along with the presence of a young boy in the midst of the action, although in Angel and the Badman the kid is the younger brother of the Quaker girl, whereas in Witness he’s the son of Kelly McGillis. 

And unless I blinked and missed it I don’t remember any scene in which Gail Russell washes her half-naked body while John Wayne watches from the doorway. Damn the Hays Code, that’s all I can say.

I was pleasantly surprised by the appearance of Harry Carey Senior as Marshall Wistful McClintock – what a great name - who occasionally drops into the film to remind Wayne he’s a wanted man. 

Carey is still sporting the same gesture of scratching his face with his thumb that he employed countless times in the many silent Cheyenne Harry films he made with John Ford. 

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Tycoon 1947

RKO, Dir: Richard Wallace, colour, 128m

Cast: John Wayne, Laraine Day, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Anthony Quinn, Judith Anderson, Paul Fix

In a rare 1940s excursion into Technicolor, Duke plays Johnny Munroe, a mining

engineer in charge of building a tunnel under the Andes mountains. 

There’s a pre-echo of the scene from Rio Bravo when Wayne kisses Walter Brennan on his forehead, Duke twice doing the same to James Gleason in this movie. 

The apparent bad guy here is the villainous looking Frederick Alexander, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the tycoon of the title who has hired Munroe and his crew to blast their way through the mountains. 

Co-scripted by Borden Chase, on paper this RKO production looks promising but alas, even with the combined talents of everyone involved, the film fails to deliver.

The extremely easy-on-the-eye Laraine Day plays Wayne’s love interest and eventual wife and, surprise surprise, she’s Hardwicke’s daughter as well. 

Directing honours go to a certain Richard Wallace, famous for previous efforts such as Eight Girls in a Boat and, my particular favourite, A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob. 

Tycoon is too long with a running time of nearly 130 minutes, and too short on action. I have to admit I found myself skipping large chunks of the film in which nothing seemed to be happening other than two people talking to each other, whereas watching JW dynamite his way across South America would have been infinitely more interesting.

What with this being set in pre health and safety days, there’s an awful lot of risk taking involved when it comes to handling the dynamite. 

The inevitable consequence of this is large helpings of cave-ins, injuries and general industrial mayhem. 

You just know the guy who utters the words “it’s great to be alive” after an explosion will inevitably suffer the curse of Richard Jaekel, another actor who rarely ever made it through to the last reel in the 1940s. 

In this case it’s a character by the name of Curly. 

When the doomed Curly cops it, JW honours his dying wish and cancels the

tunnel, opting to build a bridge instead. After this point JW loses the light touch and goes all mean and ornery, flouting safety rules and dissing his men in order to finish the job he started for his wife’s father. 

It’s a strange transformation of character and jars with what has gone previously, with JW now openly declaring he’s only in it for the money.

I first saw this many years ago on TV and in those days anything with Wayne in it was always worth catching. 

Watching it again after all these years I didn’t appreciate the first time around that the film is turgid to say the least. The model work is laughable, a combination of Meccano and Lego that belies the $3 million budget.

JWs lack of interpersonal man management skills means his work force desert him in his hour of need. His estranged wife returns, which brings the work force back together, indicating that it takes the love of a good woman to build bridges.

After making Tycoon, Duke went on the following year to star in Red River, Fort Apache and 3 Godfathers, so I guess I’ll give him a pass on this one.

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Red River 1948

United Artists, Dir: Howard Hawks, b/w, 127m
Cast:  John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Harry Carey Snr., Harry Carey Jnr., Paul Fix

If there is such a thing as a towering Duke performance, then Red River has it in spades. 

Dimitri Tiomkin’s thunderous marching theme (which as all you Wayne fans know serves as the melody for My Rifle, Pony and Me in Rio Bravo – and when is someone going to release the original recording of the Red River soundtrack?) immediately announces that we are in the company of a classic Western from the very first frame, and both Hawks and Wayne deliver the goods accordingly. 

In Wayne’s first Western for Hawks he plays the determined and stubborn Texas cattleman Tom Dunson, a character more in tune with the complexities of Ethan Edwards and Tom Doniphon than the straightforward and uncomplicated cowboys he had played previously. 

This is the period in Wayne’s career when he starts to show real range in his acting abilities, famously prompting Ford to declare after seeing Red River that ‘I didn’t know the son-of-a-bitch could act’. 

As the film progresses Dunson gets meaner and more unlikeable, and it’s a credit to Wayne that he was confident enough in his acting abilities to play such an aggressive and unpleasant individual as Dunson at this point in his career.

Montgomery Clift would not have been my first choice to co-star with Wayne as the orphaned Matt Garth who is taken under Dunson’s wing as a young boy. 

Clift more than holds his own against Duke, however, eventually taking control of the cattle drive, whilst Wayne’s character becomes more and more embittered. Not surprisingly she spurns Dunson’s offer and takes up with Matt Garth instead.

Red River is notable for the first time that both Harry Carey Senior and Junior appeared in the same film, although they don’t share any scenes together. 

Walter Brennan as trail cook Groot (I am Groot?) here plays a younger version of Stumpy in the later Rio Bravo, although he looks exactly the same in both films – I think he must have been born old. 

Throw in cattle stampedes, wagon train massacres and the like and you have the first real classic Western from director Howard Hawks.

The only false note for me is the ending, in which a murderous Wayne goes gunning for Clift. 

They engage in a vicious fist fight which is then abruptly terminated by the intervention of Joanne Dru, who scolds the two men as though they were little boys. 

It just feels to me as though no one could come up with a more convincing ending – apparently the original ending had to be changed as it bore too close a resemblance to a previous Hawks film, The Outlaw – but I have to admit in the scheme of things it doesn’t hurt the overall impact of the film in general or Wayne’s magnificent performance in particular.

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Fort Apache 1948

Argosy Pictures, Dir: John Ford, b/w, 125m
Cast: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, John Agar, Pedro
Armendariz, Victor McLaglen

The journalist-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich once wrote that if you viewed the films of John Ford in terms of chronological narrative ie. start with Drums Along the Mohawk which is set during the American war of Independence then move on

to the Civil War with The Horse Soldiers and the settling of the West with Wagonmaster etc, you would be presented with a fairly comprehensive lesson on the history of America. 

Based on that premise, if you want to know what happened to General Custer, look no further than Fort Apache. Wayne’s first Western with Ford since Stagecoach nearly a decade before, and the first in the director’s unofficial cavalry trilogy, the film tells the story of a strait-laced career officer, Lt. Col Owen Thursday, played by Henry Fonda, who takes command of the outpost where Wayne, as Captain Kirby Yorke, is also stationed.

Fonda’s character leads his men to a glorious but meaningless death a la Custer at the end of the film, leaving Wayne, who has missed out on the action due to insubordination, to deliver the eulogy for the dead men. 

Although Fonda is ostensibly the main star of the film this is where Wayne takes up the baton as Ford’s leading man from now on, Fonda appearing only once more in a Ford film with the troubled production Mister Roberts in 1955. 

Wayne’s final speech, and his best moment in the film, praises the actions of Thursday and his men, calling to mind the line from the later The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that, ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. 

The story of Kirby Yorke doesn’t finish here though. Wayne reprises the role in Ford’s Rio Grande a few years later, accompanied by some of the same actors from this film.

Fort Apache is the first time Wayne works with Victor McLaglen, here playing Sergeant Mulcahey, after which he then appears as Sergeant Quincannon in both She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande. However, the role of Sergeant Quincannon in Fort Apache is played by Dick Foran. Confusing, isn’t it? 

Ford stock company perennials Ward Bond and Hank Worden also feature in Fort Apache, making this and the other two entries in the trilogy a real family affair. 

We also get another lesson in how not to act from John Agar. How that man ever got the equivalent of an American equity card is totally beyond me.

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3 Godfathers1948

Argosy Pictures, Dir: John Ford, colour, 106m
Cast:  John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, Harry Carey Jnr., Mildred Natwick, Ward Bond, Mae Marsh

This is a real gem of a movie, and a great ensemble piece for Wayne, Harry Carey

Jr. and Pedro Armendariz. 

It’s also the third film version of the story, which should basically be subtitled The Three Wise Men Go West. 

Ford had made a silent version back in 1919 called Marked Men, with Harry Carey Senior playing the role reprised by Wayne in this version. 

There was also an earlier sound adaptation released in 1936 but this is probably the definitive version. 

Wayne, here playing a character called Robert Marmaduke Sangster Hightower, stumbles with his two outlaw companions upon a dying woman about to give birth while they’re on the run from a local posse. 

This time we get Duke in affable mood, one of Ford’s ‘good bad men’ in the mould of the Ringo Kid and modelled on Harry Carey Senior’s Cheyenne Harry character from Ford’s silent period. 

It’s safe to say we’re not in Searchers or Liberty Valance territory here. In fact, it’s almost a continuation of the character Wayne played the year previously in Angel and the Badman, Duke’s career at this point in time obviously going through it’s baby-holding period. 

Carey Senior died a year before the film was released and Ford had put his son, Harry ‘Dobe’ Carey under contract to his Argosy production company. 

This was Dobe’s first film for Ford, and he’s quietly impressive as the Abilene Kid. If you want the lowdown on how Ford treated his new young actor during the filming of 3 Godfathers, then look no further than Carey’s highly readable book, Company of Heroes, in which he recounts how Ford made him suffer during the filming of his death scene which took place in Death Valley. 

Dobe’s wife, Marilyn, told me when I met the couple back in 2007 that there were times when Ford could be quite scary to be around. Read the book and you’ll find out why.

Wayne also acquits himself very well in this film. It’s less of an action film, however, and more an obvious Biblical parable, with the three outlaws giving up

the opportunity to escape from the law in order that the child of the dead mother survives.

Duke eventually delivers the baby to safety just in time for Christmas. And just in case the audience still doesn’t get the point he takes the baby to a town called New Jerusalem. 

Despite Ford’s somewhat sadistic treatment of Carey Junior, the director pays a poignant tribute to Harry Carey Senior at the beginning of the movie. 

He filmed a short scene using Cliff Lyons, who eventually ended up working as a stuntman and helped Wayne with the battle sequences in The Alamo, doubling as Dobe’s dad on Carey Senior’s favourite horse, Sonny. 

The film is ‘Dedicated to Harry Carey, a bright star in the early Western sky’. I think that’s why, out of all the films Dobe appeared in, it was a DVD copy of 3 Godfathers that I asked him to sign for me. 

Not a genuine Ford masterpiece, and not your typical Wayne cowboy action film, but highly watchable just the same.

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Wake Of The Red Witch 1948

Republic, Dir: Edward Ludwig, b/w, 106m
Cast:  John Wayne, Gail Russell, Gig Young, Adele Mara, Luther Adler, Paul Fix

You can tell almost from the opening credits that this is going to be a rather more classier affair from Republic this time – Herbert Yates allegedly gave the film a budget of $1,000,000 - and I’d say this is probably the best of the Republic Studio John Wayne vehicles from the 1940s.

Reunited with Gail Russell of Angel and the Badman fame from the previous year, JW is back at sea in Reap the Wild Wind mode as Captain Ralls. 

He doesn’t appear to sport a Christian name in this one unless it’s either Duke or John – and he commands a sailing ship belonging to a company called Batjak – sound familiar? 

JW channels his inner Captain Bligh – a character that also informed his portrayal as the belligerent cattle driver Thomas Dunson in Red River– as the mean and ornery Ralls. 

Strange, sadistic and cold’ as Gig Young describes him in voiceover narration. 

It turns out he’s actually a violent drunk as well, almost killing a man with his bare hands who had dared to defy his orders. From that moment on I knew this film was one of those rare beasts – a film in which JW doesn’t make it to the end credits.

He scuttles his own ship, carrying a cargo of 5 million in gold, and is charged with barratry – nope, me neither. 

Seems he has a beef with the owner of Batjak, a certain Mayrant Sidneye, played with villainous relish by Luther Adler. 

We know he’s the villain because he’s in a wheelchair, sports a scar on his forehead and laughs out of context a lot. 

Duke, along with Gig Young and – yes – Paul Fix, are lured to a distant island by Sidneye, telling Wayne he’s going to get his revenge for the scuttling of his ship. 

There’s a certain noirish style to the film with the use of a flashback to explain the enmity between Ralls and Sidneye.

 During this sequence who should pop up in an uncredited role as an island native

but the one and only Henry Brandon, eight years before he faced off against Wayne as Scar in The Searchers. 

There’s another familiar face in the film as well, the smaller brother of the squid that offed JW in Reap the Wild Wind. This time, however, our boy comes out on top in the encounter with the rubber thing from beneath the sea. 

It turns out Cap’n Ralls and Sidneye both lust after the same woman, the beautiful Angelique Desaix, played by the beautiful Gail Russell. She only has eyes for Duke of course but, without relaying the whole of the plot that you can read for yourself online – or better still watch the film yourself – Angelique marries the villain before dying in the arms of Ralls who then decides to avenge her death by scuttling Sidneye’s boat. 

Towards the end the story takes a rather surreal turn with Sidneye practically declaring his love for Ralls. 

It’s as if he relishes the ongoing enmity between them, and that the world will be a sadder place for him with Ralls gone. And go he does, our boy drowning whilst trying to retrieve the gold from the Red Witch.

One of the better non-Western JW vehicles if I’m honest, and definitely worth checking out if you’ve not yet seen it.

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The Fighting Kentuckian 1949

Republic, Dir: George Waggner, b/w, 100m
Cast:  John Wayne, Vera Ralston, Oliver Hardy, Philip Dorn, Marie Windsor, Paul Fix

Now this is a bit of a strange one. 

John Wayne and Oliver Hardy (the larger of the Laurel and Hardy comedy duo), together for the first, and last time on the big screen. 

I’m tempted to quote the old line ‘that’s another fine mess you’ve got me into, Mr Wayne’, but it’s a relatively entertaining film, if not a JW classic. 

I note that this is also a ‘John Wayne Production’ so I’m assuming Duke had something to do with the casting of Olly, who doesn’t really do much other than play his famous screen incarnation dressed up in fringe leather frontier getup and a beaver hat. 

Wayne seems to be wearing the same duds he had on in Allegheny Uprising, still apparently auditioning for the part of Davy Crockett.

The story, such as it is, revolves around a ‘little known episode in American history’, in which a bunch of French exiles who followed Napoleon settle in America in the 1840s. 

Wayne and his fellow Kentuckian militia wander through on their way to – actually I don’t know where they’re off to – but Duke, playing a character by the name of John Breen, ends up scoring with Vera Walston after only 7 minutes into the picture which I think is a record even for him. 

Mind you, she does look particularly ravishing – which is probably why Republic studio head Herbert Yates left his wife and kids for her - and that French accent sure helps things along, Vera in turn falling head over heels with “Shonbreen” as she calls him.

Wayne and Hardy sing a marching song together which is something I never thought would be captured on celluloid. 

Another unique aspect of the film is the sequence in which Wayne converses with himself, his alter ego addressing him as a voiceover. Weird. 

At some point in the proceedings he and Hardy end up posing as land surveyors so cue a bit of Hardy stumbling around, falling into the water – twice – and other moments of hilarity to justify his presence in the movie. 

I could go into the plot in more detail but basically you get your usual land grabbing shenanigans going on which JW naturally stumbles into, but I’m not sure it’s going to make that much difference.

If you’re a John Wayne fan – and if you’re not, what are you doing reading this in the first place – all you’re going to be looking for is as much action as possible, a couple of punch ups, JW coming out on top as a good guy and the female characters throwing themselves at his feet. 

If so, then The Fighting Kentuckian is right up your happy trail, although I have to admit there’s not as much action as I seemed to remember, watching it again after almost forty years or so, and personally I found it a bit wordy.

The inevitable clash between the good guys and the bad guys takes place, good triumphs over bad and Wayne ends up getting hitched to the lovely Vera. 

Just as the happy couple are about to ride away Wayne and Hardy exchange a friendly wink. 

Wayne states to his new bride, ’we can’t take him on honeymoon with us, can we?’ I’m assuming the question was rhetorical. At least I’m hoping it was.

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She Wore A Yellow Ribbon 1949

Argosy Pictures, Dir: John Ford, colour, 103m
Cast:  John Wayne, Joanne Dru, John Agar, Harry Carey Jnr., Victor McLaglen, Ben Johnson

Of the unofficial cavalry trilogy that John Ford directed I’d say that She Wore a Yellow Ribbon occupies first position, with Fort Apache and Rio Grande trailing

second and third. 

I say this because John Wayne’s performance as Nathan Brittles, a character supposedly at least twenty years older than Wayne was at the time he made the film, is definitely up there with Ethan Edwards and Tom Doniphon as one of his greatest character studies. 

You could argue that in The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Duke couldn’t help being ‘John Wayne’ at times. 

As Nathan Brittles, however, Wayne convinces completely as the elderly soldier called upon to perform one last mission – to help negotiate peace between the warring Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes - before heading off to retirement.

It’s less an action film and more a rumination on growing old, the scene towards the end of the film when he and Chief Pony That Walks discuss going hunting, fishing and drinking reinforcing the anachronistic nature of the two characters. 

For some strange reason Wayne seemed to think when he was interviewed in 1971 for Playboy that he had been nominated for an Oscar for this film. 

Unfortunately, that turns out not to be the case but he was definitely robbed in my opinion, delivering a more studied and measured performance here than he did in Sands of Iwo Jima which was released in the same year, for which he did actually receive his first Academy nomination.

Joanne Dru is the prevaricating love interest of both Agar and Carey Jr, settling for Agar in the end. 

In my opinion Dobe should have put up more of a fight, something I forgot to mention to him when I met him. 

The love triangle sub-plot comes over a bit clunky and threatens to detract from the main story of Wayne’s impending retirement. 

That’s a small price to pay though when matched against Wayne’s consummate performance – witness the scene where his troop present him with a gold watch ‘with a sentiment on the back’ – along with Ford’s peerless direction and the Oscar-winning cinematography of Winston Hoch. 

Prior to The Searchers I don’t think Monument Valley has ever looked so beautiful and Hoch captures the landscape like never before. 

Add to all of this the performance of Victor McLaglen as the Irish sergeant also on the cusp of retiring – I’m guessing he must have re-enlisted for Rio Grande – and you have a perfect example of how Ford and Wayne can deliver the goods when they’re both firing on all cylinders.

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Sands of Iwo Jima 1949

Republic, Dir: Allan Dwan, b/w, 100m
Cast: John Wayne, John Agar, Adele Mara, Forrest Tucker, Wally Cassell, James Brown

With this film, Republic finally delivers the goods when it comes to Wayne at war.

Directed by Allan Dwan who, like Ford, had started his career in the silent era, the film depicts the savagery of the no-holds barred fighting at Iwo Jima. 

Nominated for his first Academy Award, Wayne’s performance is more complex than usual, something he had started to hint at in Red River the year before and which reached its height in The Searchers a few years later. 

He plays Sergeant Stryker, a veteran of Guadalcanal, who is put in charge of getting his marines in shape for battle.

The Japanese, now that the the war had been over for about 4 years, are referenced a bit more respectfully than before. No more talk of baboons. 

This time around they’re Nips, or ‘little lemon coloured characters’. They’re reduced once more, however, to non-characters, the enemy the audience doesn’t get to know apart from watching them bayonet and kill their way through the film.

Also, even if I hadn’t picked up on it in the credits, I would have guessed James Edward Grant had something to do with the script. 

Wayne utters the words ‘I’m going to tell you something’, in exactly the same way he addresses Linda Crystal in The Alamo, which of course Grant wrote the script for.

John Agar doesn’t really convince as the embittered son of Wayne’s previous commander, who has died at Guadalcanal. 

The not-so-subtle story line hinges on the idea that the tough Stryker will eventually bring Agar’s character around to stop thinking of him as another version of his father who was apparently somewhat of a martinet, but Agar’s acting abilities just don’t stretch that far.

Forrest Tucker, who is also in the film, might have made a better go of playing Agar’s character, but his part in the film is mainly there to initiate a fist fight with Wayne that doesn’t really get resolved until Chisum 20-odd years later.

Although it’s nearly half an hour before the action hits the screen it’s well worth the wait. 

The battle sequences, despite being interspersed with stock footage of what appears to be the real fight for Iwo Jima, are quite impressive, and more realistic than previous Wayne WWII films. 

I think it could have done without the Hollywood practise of giving someone a final word just before they die, one character who has just been shot exclaiming ‘I’ll get a good nights sleep tonight’ before crumpling to the ground. 

On the other hand, it adds to the genuine shock of Wayne’s own sudden death scene because he doesn’t get the chance to say anything at all. One moment he’s telling everyone he feels good, the next thing he’s being shot in the back by one of those nasty Nips and dying instantly.

This realistic depiction of death is somewhat diluted by the sentimentality of Stryker’s last letter to his son being read out aloud, then Agar’s unconvincing acceptance to take up Wayne’s mantle. 

However, all of this is compensated for in the last scene showing the flag finally being raised on Iwo Jima, which is genuinely moving and a fitting tribute to the real soldiers who died there, so overall I’d have to vote this one of the better efforts of the WWII films Wayne appeared in during the 1940s. 

In fact, I think he should have got his first Oscar for his performance as Stryker – he lost to Broderick Crawford this time around - although for my money he was even better in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.