John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman Page A

Wayne . . . is tender, and more than a little wistful; it is delicate and incredibly sensitive. Pure and sweet; shy, really and demure.” The difference is that the young man was the authentic Duke Morrison; the older man was the hardened construct called John Wayne.
    The young version is sometimes awkward in his line readings, and his reactions are occasionally over the top, as they often were in the first phase of his career. Nevertheless, for a kid who was lugging props a few months before, a kid with aptitude but little training or experience, he’s not bad, and his star quality is fully present.
    Most importantly, the film presents Wayne’s screen character in rough sketch form. Despite his youth, Breck Coleman is tough and in charge, with a natural air of command that’s accepted by the other characters. “You fight, that’s life,” he asserts at one point. “You stop fighting, that’s death.” It’s a line that could have been dropped into
Red River, The Searchers, The Alamo
, or any major Wayne movie from the coming decades. If the western is the foundational myth of America in movie form, then Breck Coleman is the rough, occasionally halting foundation myth of John Wayne.
    The young star’s combination of physical strength and grace is already apparent. In his otherwise surly book about Wayne, Garry Wills was amazed by a throwaway shot in which Wayne comes up behind a woman, lifts her by her elbows, flips her around so she’s facing him, and hugs her. “He does not
throw
her, even slightly, and catch her after turning her; he just handles her as if she were an empty cardboard box, weightless and unresisting.” Wayne’s physical and emotional strength were always matched by an equivalent control and sense of purpose; at the beginning of his career or at its end, he never made a clumsy gesture.
    Marguerite Churchill is attractive and professional but not distinguished, and Tyrone Power Sr. gives a roaring performance of pure ham—he makes Wallace Beery look subtle—that seems to have been the model for the Wolf in Disney’s
The Three Little Pigs
. Ward Bond shows up on the periphery sporting a beard.
    A passion for performance was clearly present in Wayne very early, but so was an uneasiness with his choice, the same uneasiness that would be present in the lives of other actors: Barrymore, Flynn, Holden, etc. Perhaps acting was an unsuitable job for a man? Wayne would spend the rest of his life insisting that he wasn’t an actor, he was a reactor, which was really just a backdoor way of asserting his masculinity.
    In truth, Wayne instinctively grasped something very close to the modern American concept of acting, which emphasizes behavior over the dialogue-based English tradition. Behavior works for all sorts of parts, but is insufficient when confronted with, say, Shakespeare, which has to be spoken. But Wayne’s characters would always be defined as much by movement and attitude as by words.
    Raoul Walsh’s shots are much more carefully composed than most of his work; the dimensions of the 70mm frame mandate a lot of extras and background action, and the lenses don’t let Walsh get any closer than a chest close-up. The lack of intimacy is compensated for by the majestic long shots. Generally, Walsh frames his shots so as to leave a third to a half of the frame open to landscape or background action.
    Walsh’s images made
The Big Trail
an authentic epic, but they weren’t able to prevent it from being an authentic epic flop. It ran for eight weeks at the Chinese Theatre—a good run—but only two weeks at the Roxy. More importantly,
The Big Trail
underperformed in conventional 35mm showings in the rest of the country. Theater chains, having just expensively retooled for sound, weren’t interested in expensively retooling yet again. Absent any widespread public demand for 70mm, it was easier to just let it wither away.
    Unfortunately, the 35mm version of the film didn’t fully show off the