Subscribe"I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."The man was a vile racist. He didn't kill any Indians himself only because he was born 50 years too late.
I use the handle "john wayne" when I want to post some really virulent anti-patriotic words on forums that allow handles-on-the-fly.Why not Ed Anger?
[Raoul] Walsh's advice to Wayne was to play his part "with a cool hand like you'd do on a football field." He also told him to "speak softly but with authority, and look whoever you're talking to right in the eye."It's always a little more complex and interesting in reality. While the first quote is by a guy who wrote a cornily entitled book about Wayne, still, the opinions of Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Lee Strasberg and Katharine Hepburn should matter, as they were people who knew more than a little bit about acting.
Indeed, actors who worked with Wayne always marveled at his ability to listen and look at the other players straight in the eyes. Right after the screen test, Walsh knew that "all Wayne had to do was to be himself. His personality, looks, and natural mannerisms were made in order for motion pictures."
For a whole decade, Wayne practiced his skills in mostly B-movies. He became known for his underacting, as Walsh noted: "Wayne underacts, and it's mighty effective, not because he tries to underact--it's a hard thing to do if you try--but because he can't overact."
Wayne subscribed to the naturalistic school of acting, as he explained: "I merely try to act naturally. If I start acting phony on the screen, you start looking at me instead of feeling with me. But you can't be natural; you have to act natural, because if you're just natural you can drop a scene."
The closest thing Wayne came to having a coach on the set was Paul Fix, a character actor of the silent era whom Wayne had met through Loretta Young. Fix recalled that "Duke was bright enough, but he didn't know how to prove it, what to do with his hands, and after three lines he was lost." Wayne and Fix worked out a set of signals: when Wayne was overdoing his famed brow furrowing, Fix would put his hands on his head. Fix was on the sets of Wayne's movies for years, but nobody ever noticed.
Wayne gave a lot of credit to Yakima Canutt, the distinguished stunt man, who taught him all of his tricks, including how to fall off a horse without getting hurt. "I took his walk and the way he talked, sorta low with quiet strength," Wayne said. The waffled forehead, cocked eyebrows, and swivel-hipped walk were all modeled on Canutt's techniques.
Wayne learned from Ford, his most frequent and favorite director, to let the other actors in his scenes guide his performance. He thought of himself as a reactor rather than actor: "I can react to a situation that has already been built up when I walk on, but I don't like to explain that situation myself."
For Wayne, the difference between good and bad acting, was "the difference between acting and reacting." He explained: "In a bad picture, you see them acting all over the place. In a good picture, they react in a logical way to a situation they're in, so the audience can identify with the actors." However, Wayne insisted that reacting was a valid form of acting, and harder work than given credit to. Screen acting was "a matter of handling yourself, comparable to sitting in a room with somebody you know." In film, "the audiences are with you--unlike the stage, where they're looking at you--so you've got to be careful to project the right illusion."
Over the years, Wayne mastered the art of natural acting, which also characterized the style of Cooper and Gable. John Ford these performers as "great actors, because they are the same off the screen as they are playing a part." As for Wayne's distinctive style, Ford said: "He's not something out of a book, governed by acting rules. He portrays John Wayne, a rugged American guy. He's not one of those method actors, like they send out here from drama schools in New York. He's real, perfectly natural."
Lee Strasberg, of the Actors Studio and Method acting, also believed that "good acting exists when an actor thinks and reacts as much to imaginary situations as those in real life. Cooper, Wayne, and Tracy, try not to act but to be themselves, to respond or react. They refuse to do or say anything they feel not to be consonant with their own characters."
Katharine Hepburn, who appeared with Wayne in "Rooster Cogburn", once described Wayne as an actor with an extraordinary gift. A unique naturalness, developed by movie actors who just happened to become actors." What impressed her about Wayne was his "unself-consciousness, and very subtle capacity to think and caress the camera--the audience, with no apparent effort." For Hepburn, Wayne and other actors of his kind developed a technique similar to that of well-trained actors from the theater, arriving at the same point from an entirely different beginning." Wayne's acting was based on "the illusion of a total reality of performance, to the point where the acting does not appear acting, and becomes as powerful as his personality. Hepburn thought "Wayne was a very, very good actor, in the most highbrow sense of the word, because you don't catch him at that."
John Wayne:
Prophet of the American Way of Life
"How can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when he sweeps Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?" asked French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. His Wayne-bivalence is not mine. My feelings about an artist's politics rarely get in the way of appreciating his art.
Wrestling with the Duke
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posted by miss lynnster at 8:40 AM on May 27, 2007