Last night, on the big HDTV, with the collaboration of Netflix, and peering through our toes, we watched the John Ford cavalry movie "Rio Grande." I first saw this film in the year of its release (I was eleven years old) at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue.
In days of yore, it was the custom for the neighborhood urchins to take in a double bill on a rainy Saturday afternoon. It was a good way for our harried mothers to dispose of us for four hours -- and on the cheap, inasmuch as the price of admission was only fourteen cents.
"Rio Grande" was a perfect kind of urchin movie. Good guys (cavalry) versus bad guys (Indians), lots of action, no overt sex. It offered much too much singing, but the slow periods would have been enlivened by hoots, whistles, popcorn-throwing, banging the head of the kid in the seat in front of you with the heel of your hand, primitive pre-flirting, and chasing in the aisles.
In 1950, Maureen O'Hara (John Wayne's estranged wife), was puzzling if not inexplicable -- merely an impediment to the action. Sixty years later, she is beautiful, dignified, even majestic. The poor Apaches, who for me and for my heedless comrades were nothing other than targets for cavalry bullets, are now unutterably tragic. John Wayne was then an immensely heroic figure, but with the passing of years. he has become a rigid incompetent dope.
The West, in those days, was part Monument Valley, part myth; now I live in a West that has nothing to do with Coney Island Avenue, even less with John Ford.
I think John Wayne missed an opportunity to show his versatility when he turned down the role of Mrs. Robinson's pathetic husband in "The Graduate." "True Grit," though, works pretty well for him. "Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!"
The Leader, for me, was the place where I saw "Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla" and loved it. I believed the guy who played the lead was really Jerry Lewis. The Leader was also a place where I would watch 20 cartoons in a row and laugh myself sick over Foghorn Leghorn.
Does anyone remember the freebies that were given out on colored sheets? If you had the right number, you got in for free. It was upsetting when the Leader became a bowling alley.
Posted by: Don Z. Block | August 10, 2020 at 02:47 PM
I was unclear. It's not Wayne's movie-starrish acting style to which I object. It's his character's (Colonel Yorke's)lack of strategic skills: so his fort is unprepared for a predictable guerilla attack, and then, compounding the incompetence, he sends a lightly-guarded convoy of women and children through hostile territory. He's a dope, militarily. But I agree that it's difficult to see Wayne without being reminded of his JEdgarHoover-y HUAC flagwaving anticommunism.
Posted by: Vivian | January 04, 2011 at 08:31 AM
Maureen O’Hara’s scenes existed solely to give us time to rush to the candy counter for fresh supplies of Goobers, Raisinettes, and Jujubes.
My view of John Wayne is the opposite of yours. I used to find him a rigid incompetent dope (a view undoubtedly colored by his mean-spirited political opinions). Now I find him an immensely heroic figure, an artist who deeply understood the art of acting in front of a movie camera. I agree with Katharine Hepburn, who said of him: "As an actor he has an extraordinary gift. A unique naturalness. A very subtle capacity to think and express and caress the camera - the audience.”
We recently rewatched Wayne’s 1968 “True Grit” and enjoyed it immensely. His Oscar was richly deserved.
Posted by: Otis J. Brown | January 04, 2011 at 06:51 AM