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

film’s primary virtues—its physical re-creation of the pioneer experience. The mini-widescreen boom of 1929–1930 died quickly, and went underground until revived in the early 1950s as a means of luring audiences back to the movies after the erosion wrought by television. (More people have seen the widescreen version of
The Big Trail
since its rediscovery in 1986 than ever saw it in 1930.)
    Winterset, Iowa, finally got to see the movie in January 1931. The
Madisonian
featured the story with the headline: “John Wayne, a Winterset Boy, in Talkies at the Iowa.” The story continued, “John Wayne is the stage name of Marion Michael Morrison, as he was known to all his friends.”
    With a negative cost of $1.7 million,
The Big Trail
amassed only $945,000 in domestic rentals, another $242,000 in foreign rentals. The foreign language versions added $200,234 to the budget, and returned a tiny profit of $9,264. When the accountants had completed their grim task, it was clear that
The Big Trail
was a financial bloodbath—the loss topped $1 million.
    As the film scholar William K. Everson noted, it’s strange that Fox hadn’t handed
The Big Trail
to John Ford, who had already demonstrated great expertise with westerns; it might not have been a better picture, but it assuredly would have been better organized, hence less expensive, hence more commercial. The failure of
The Big Trail
affected Raoul Walsh’s career to the extent that Fox never again gave him that kind of budget. But the bulk of the movie’s failure fell on its young star.
The Big Trail
was the last A picture John Wayne would make for nearly ten years, as Fox quickly canceled his prospective starring vehicles.
    Wayne next showed up in a Fox programmer called
Girls Demand Excitement
, directed by the choreographer Seymour Felix, which began shooting in November 1930 after the failure of
The Big Trail
was apparent. Wayne’s co-star was Virginia Cherrill, the leading lady of Chaplin’s
City Lights
.
    Wayne always regarded
Girls Demand Excitement
as the nadir of his professional life. “I was the fellow who was sour grapes, who played basketball to try to get the girls out of school. Well, I want to tell you something, I never tried to get a girl out of school in my life. I’d want them right there. . . . [Felix] had girls and boys sitting in trees and sticking their heads out of class windows and hugging each other. It was just so goddamn ridiculous that I was hanging my head.”
    Actually,
Girls Demand Excitement,
while innocuous, is not really as bad as Wayne thought; as Richard Roberts noted, had it been made a year earlier, or two years later, it would have made a good musical in the vein of
Good News
. Wayne plays a gardener who works for the family of the charisma-free Cherrill, a spoiled rich girl. In college, she and Wayne find themselves in a fraternity/sorority war. Wayne’s performance is relaxed and without mannerisms.
    Variety
noted that “John Wayne is the same young man who was in
The Big Trail
and also is here spotted in a farce that does little to set him off.” Wayne’s next appearance for Fox came in May 1931, when he showed up in a small part in something called
Three Girls Lost.
    Wayne was slinking around Fox, embarrassed about the failure of
The Big Trail
, utterly demoralized by
Girls Demand Excitement
, when he ran into Will Rogers, the biggest star on the lot. Rogers saw that Wayne was down and asked what the trouble was. Wayne explained his situation, and the sensible Rogers told him, “You’re working, aren’t you? Just keep working.”
    Wayne always remembered that moment as “the best advice I ever got—just keep working and learning, however bad the picture . . . and boy, I made some lousy pictures.” For the rest of his life Wayne always put more stock in being a working actor than in biding his time waiting for just the right part in just the right movie.
    Three Girls Lost
completed filming in mid-January of