Cinema: John Wayne as the Last Hero

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At home, playing grandpaterfamilias to the world, he watches his country in motion, hoping it will move into the sunlight where the contrasts are clear. He will never fill up another ashtray, but he still manages to empty a few bottles. "Getting out with my comrades," he says, "and talking revolution, jeez, I'll hit it pretty good." Forever the superpatriot, he once refused to let a bandleader play his favorite tune because "everybody would've had to stand up." Yet beyond the self-parody, beyond the fifth-face-at-Mount-Rushmore pose, there is a heroic essence that Wayne manages to convey. Today, like "war," the word "hero" is usually preceded by a disinfectant: "anti." Not to the Duke. Conflict is made to be won; heroes are created to be the uncommon man sans imperfection. "I stay away from nuances," he says. "From psychoanalyst-couch scenes. Couches are good for one thing only." As Wayne sees film heroism, "Paul Newman would have been a much more important star if he hadn't always tried to be an antihero, to show the human feeta clay." No one will ever see Wayne's feeta clay—and no one wants to. His politics seem to date from the Jurassic period, and from other men they might appear dangerous. But as expressed by the Duke they are the privately held opinions of a public man and they have the quality of valid antiques.

Robert Frost summed up old age:

No memory of having starred

Atones for later disregard,

Nor keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!

The boughten friendship goes on at the box office; Wayne will continue to provide, provide at the rate of two pictures a year. And at the final fadeout? "I would like to be remembered—well, the Mexicans have a phrase, 'Feo, fuerte y formal.' Which means: he was ugly, was strong and had dignity."

It is a well-deserved epitaph for a great gunfighter. Sorta gives a man something to shoot for.

* Dmytryk later admitted that he was a Communist for a year, in 1944-45, before undergoing "a complete change of heart."

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