I remember watching John Wayne movies with my dad when I was a kid. These were mostly Wayne's WWII movies, which my father, who was born in 1922, really liked.
Later, my generation rather scorned Wayne, mostly for his conservative political views, and I never saw his 1968 pro-Vietnam War movie, The Green Berets. But I loved True Grit, which he made only a year later.
I don't remember ever watching any of Wayne's old cowboy movies from the 1930s, but I've made up for lost time in the past two days. I think I watched a total of six of these on Hulu last night and then this afternoon, and I can say with some authority that they were all the same.
Wayne was always the hero (sometimes he rode a white horse, sometimes he wore a white hat). The mixture of technology and fashions make it impossible to determine when these films were supposed to be set--telephones, cars and trucks, women in jeans, and men on horseback with six-shooters, all against a Western ranch background with lots of cattle and dust. Wayne never drives a vehicle; he's always galloping to the rescue on horseback, gun blazing, And he always gets the girl.
There was only one female part in each of these films, played by an impossibly beautiful young woman with 1920s-vintage bobbed hair and makeup and wearing jeans.
Wayne's acting wasn't much (some say he played himself for decades, or the self he wanted to be, anyway), but he had that certain something.
I had never seen this John Wayne. He is tall (6'4"), slender, amazingly coordinated, and quite beautiful. I couldn't help thinking of Clint Eastwood and all his early spaghetti Westerns. He was beautiful too, and was criticized for his wooden acting until he'd been doing that squint for decades and the critics finally caught on.
After wearing myself out watching a variation on the same plot for the sixth or seventh time, I finally had enough and jumped over to Wikipedia to read Wayne's biography. I was curious to know how old he was when he made all these cowboy movies (late 20s, mostly).
Of course, I learned a lot that I didn't know about Wayne, who was born in 1907. I didn't care about his three marriages or the controversy over his failing to enlist during WWII (while playing all those war heros), but the cancer information jumped out at me.
I didn't know that Wayne, a chain smoker for years, had a lung and four ribs removed in 1964 to treat lung cancer. (Of course, I was only 10 at the time, so it is understandable that I missed this, even though I was a heavy reader of Life magazine during those years.) Wayne's lung cancer was cured, but he developed stomach cancer in the late 1970s, and that was the illness that killed him, in 1979.
I also didn't know that Wayne and the entire cast and crew (some 220 people) of the 1956 film The Conqueror were downwinders. They were exposed to fallout from nuclear weapons testing while making the film in Utah and, according to Wikipedia, 91 of them developed cancer by 1981, including Wayne.
For the statisticians among us, that is a 41 percent morbidity rate.
Oh, Wayne played Genghis Khan in the film--I can't imagine it.
And--yet another also--I didn't know about the John Wayne Cancer Institute and the John Wayne Cancer Foundation.
OK, here's the punch line: I was looking for some escape from my life with cancer when I started watching all these old movies on Hulu. Sigh.
See:
@ Jeanne Sather 2010.
