This is a great article. I’m not all to familiar with Wayne’s work, I’ll be honest. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading this.

Your article was wonderful. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it at first, but you won me over.

I have become a great fan of Wayne in the last few years, something I thought would never happen to me. The late Wayne westerns were uncomfortable for me as a kid. His politics, which have receded a bit lately, put me off. His strength seemed like bullying, his moral rectitude seemed superhuman and preachy.

Then, recently, thanks to some friends here at TCM message boards, I saw the great actor he was in his younger days, and how tender and emotional he could be. He created roles with chinks in the armor, and this is what drew me to Wayne, finally and lastingly. His hero really started to connect with me, a man who has his faults, but makes up for it when the time comes to choose sides.

Thanks for allowing me to see a side of the older Wayne that I had not really looked at before. I agree, we would be better off nowadays with heroes who know the difference between right and wrong, and who actually choose the right in the end.

It’s hard to see Wayne as having an absolute and correct sense of right and wrong in the Searchers- shooting out the dead Indian’s eyes doesn’t seem to be represented as a moral action within the movie, and it certainly doesn’t come off that way. While Wayne eventually finds a morality (as Eastwood often would) he spends most of the movie on a quest to murder the only survivor of his family- it seems as though his moral compass was broadly not well calibrated.

Of course, that’s the exception rather than the rule, and one of the things that makes the Searchers noteworthy. More broadly, I think the problem with having a hero with an absolute sense of right and wrong is that, unlike a Batman, a Superman has to have viewers agree pretty exactly with the creators of what right and wrong comprise- if Batman does something nasty, breaks a man’s legs to get information, the viewer doesn’t necessarily need to assume the creators think that is a moral act, nor that they want the audience to be comfortable with it. If Superman does something like that, the viewer has to accept that the creators think torture is part of Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Of course, the whole idea that the hero would torture someone for information is largely borne of the age of the cynical anti-hero, so it might be better still to have a class of heroes who don’t _need_ to do horrible things in pursuit of their goals. But I’d rather the heroes look like Humphrey Bogart than John Wayne- the later Bogart, from Casablanca onwards, who never wanted to look like a hero, never felt like one, and behaved heroically anyway. It’s easier to buy, and easier to sympathize with, because Bogart had actual crises of conscience. For most of his features, Wayne did the right thing, because what Wayne did was defined as right. When Bogart did the right thing, it was painful, and earned.

Right on, Tom S! I’d also like to say further that the heroes davidkalat loves so much are still on the screen-they’re the basis of most of the main characters of most of the action movies seen for the past 30 years or more. Plus, Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was the kind of hero that davidkalat might like as well, even though he’s a little goofy. Brandon Routh in Superman Returns was like that also, yet he got pilloried for it and called ‘gay’ on account of his costume being not as macho as most people wanted.

To sum it up-’Good guys win even in the 2000′s’.

I just would like to express my gratitude for this article. I grew up watching John Wayne & have many of his movies in my collection as “go-to” movies when I’m bored of TV, which is quite often. I never tire of watching them.

Maybe I’m naive or romanticizing…but they don’t make movies like they used to…

I also grew up watching John Wayne’s movies and do appreciate his characters’ strength and portrayal of the hero. I too remember watching the westerns on many Sat. nights with my dad, who usually had the tv tuned to NBC, since they were the network often showing these films.
There are a few pictures Wayne starred in where his character was conflicted, not portraying a hero dealing with black and white issues, but lots of gray. The Searchers, mentioned already, is one such character, and so is his rancher moving cattle in The Red River. But one film I recently saw was sad in its ending;to me it was jarring that the main conflict of the film couldn’t be resolved in a neat black and white kind of way. The Wings of Eagles, paired Wayne with his beautiful co-star Maureen O’Hara, and the flick was a biopic of Frank “Spig” Wead, a former air force pilot/commander who became a screenwriter after an accident in his home injured his spine severely. What I found so tragic, was that due to Wead’s(Wayne)absences from home because of air force duties, wars, etc. was that he and his wife(O’Hara) grew so far apart emotionally from one another. They made a few attempts to reconcile and heal their marriage, but even after the serious injury Wead suffered, the marriage couldn’t be saved, and the movie ends with it obvious that the couple so in love at the movie’s beginning won’t be together again. I found this a very unusual ending for a John Wayne picture. At the end of The Searchers, Wayne’s character realizes his error of hatred against his niece who had adapted to the culture and life of the Native Americans who had kidnapped her as a child, and he takes her home to the living relatives who can care for her and bring her back to her original culture and way of life. At the end of Red River, Wayne’s character doesn’t kill his adopted son, Montgomery Clift, and they successfully reach their goal of hauling cattle across the country. But in The Wings of Eagles, the happy ending isn’t there, and I feel it’s a good example of Wayne playing a character with flaws, who doesn’t wind up doing the heroic thing in the end.

Thank you for your article on my favorite actor. My dad would always watch the Poverty Row westerns when I was growing up. I wasn’t as interested in them as I was in the A pictures, the later ones starring John Wayne and the like. So, I guess I raised myself on iconic John Wayne. From Stagecoach onward Duke didn’t always play a straight up, morally perfect man. Usually in the films of John Ford he was a flawed man in some way. The Ringo Kid was an anti-hero before that phrase was made popular. I believe these imperfections came from the insistence of Ford’s style. Ford was a big time liberal. Duke was a big conservative. It was their meeting in the middle onscreen that produced sublime westerns for 20 years, culminating in the masterpiece, The Searchers. Kurosawa was influenced by the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks, but skewed the characterizations a bit. Leone was obviously influenced by Kurosawa and popularized the anti-hero in the western, but the seeds had been planted long ago by Ford and Hawks. And the anti-hero in film probably began with the 30′s gangster films, which also influenced Kurosawa and Leone. I’m rambling now. I appreciate the fact that you have come to appreciate John Wayne after so many years of not doing so. It would be great if more people could open their eyes to the greatness of the Duke instead of basing their prejudice on his political ideals.

Feeling torn between delight in Wayne’s characters and discomfort/disgust in his politics goes back a long way- Jean-Luc Godard, in the fifties, wondered “How can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?”

It’s a reasonable question, but God knows you’d wind up missing out on a lot of good art if you avoided all the movies and things from people who said or did things you didn’t like outside their work- for one thing, you’d never be able to watch Chinatown again.

Very good point, Tom S. I only have a ban on Jane Fonda movies. I’m fine with not seeing another one of her movies. Anyone else’s movies are open for viewing.

I never appreciated EL DORADO and saw it as a poor man’s RIO BRAVO. But I do appreciate your essay on the reasoning for it. Just as the great RIO BRAVO was Duke/Hawk’s response to HIGH NOON which they supposedly despised. Hell, if a sheriff needs help battling the bad guys, he doesn’t fret or rely on Grace Kelly, he gets a drunk, a kid and a broken down old man.

Excellent post on an issue I struggle with in teaching film history to 20-year-olds who have grown up watching movies in which the protagonist is most often anti-heroic–not to mention playing video games in which violent revenge has replaced justice and morality.

I was heartened when I showed Bad Day at Black Rock in which the Spencer Tracy character frustrates his antagonists by backing down from macho posturing and is not pushed to violence until his life is in danger. It was something that impressed the students, who brought it up repeatedly.

The drive to push movies and characters closer to realism that began in the 1950s with method actors and proliferated in the 1960s with the anti-heroes of the Film School Generation altered the function of the protagonist. In storytelling of John Wayne’s era, movie stars and the characters they played were not intended to be real people you could relate to; instead they were representative of ideals and values you aspired to. There is meaning in finding solace in a heroic protagonist who makes a sacrifice for the greater good and represents a value you believe in–whether it’s the moral certitude of John Wayne or the everyman conscience of Jimmy Stewart and his lost causes.

However, with the drive to greater “realism,” protagonists became real-life characters you could relate to because they made mistakes, were emotionally traumatized, or didn’t always win the goal in the end. Relating to protagonists became more desirable than aspiring to an impossible ideal a character might represent. While that fit the culture of a society that was disillusioned by the politics of the era, it was the beginning of the end for romanticizing heroism in pop culture. I love films from this era and the performances of actors who excelled at playing anti-heroes, but I don’t think those are the only type of characters that should be on the screen. It shouldn’t be a question of either/or. Plus, the legacy of those characters for today’s movies is not good.

Now, superhero protagonists in commercial Hollywood features are fantasy figures that enact revenge or fulfill immature desires of the young audiences who populate the theaters. With some notable exceptions, heroism is cynically dismissed as an old-fashioned idea from “old movies.” And, contrary to what a reader notes above, the protagonists of action films of the last 30 years are generally not heroic in the classic sense of the concept; they are way too smug, violent, insincere, self-serving, and cynical.

What’s troubling about this issue is that the values and ideals the “old-fashioned” heroes embody are dismissed along with the characters, while the cynicism, immature posturing, and other negative characteristics of today’s protagonists are accepted as norms. And, if you don’t think this has much of a cultural impact because “it’s only the movies,” then you aren’t a teacher who sees it.

The great thing about the first two Spider-Man movies was that Spider-Man lived up to the classic heroic ideals. Unfortunately, since The Dark Knight (which I also loved), I think even the films about superheroes that would normally be classically heroic may end up being darkened as well because TDK was such a phenomenal success. I am holding out hope that next year’s Captain America, set during World War II, will do well focusing on a classically heroic character doing unquestionably heroic things.

El Dorado, Fistful of Dollars, loved them both. I enjoyed how you linked the two. However, since John Wayne’s character in El Dorado is a hired gunman it leaves the question, what would he had done if Mitchem’s friend/sheriff hadn’t been around to set him right about Ed Asner’s gang?

I watch Westerns daily, if I can. When I can’t I get withdrawl.
No seriously. I have seen about 115 John Wayne movies, most of which are Westerns. I have pretty much seen all Clint Eastwood’s Westerns and most of his other movies too. I have seen into the hundreds Westerms from the last 100 yrs. Many TV shows and books too. I have read almost every history book on the Old West my local library carries. I can lasso and speak Spanish and I love Tex-Mex food. It my staple diet.

[...] are truly heroic. They make a sacrifice for the greater good because it is the right thing to do. A recent post by fellow Morlock davidkalat lamented the loss of the movie hero, who has been replaced by cynical [...]

I want to add after reading this article, “Rio Bravo” was Hawks’ answer to “High Noon”. He felt a sheriff wouldn’t have to take on the bad guys by himself. Have you seen the bad guys in “High Noon”? I wouldn’t fight them no matter how much money I was offered. By the way, Gary Cooper tries to get deputies for free.That might have something to do with it. The hotel clerk makes a point to say how they’ve lost business since the town got cleaned up. Maybe there are less heroes in stories because they are afraid of what it will cost them. Their lives or just their precious money.