Over the dusty cow town, silence hangs heavy as doom. The womenfolk, both spangled and respectable, huddle helplessly on stairways and behind shuttered windows. Tense and motionless at the long bar stands a frieze of deputies and desperadoes. Even the bearded comic for once is solemn and wary. For this is the moment when virtue — lean, clean, manly, and quick on the draw — must face evil in single combat, to triumph or bite the dust.
In the 1,001 variations of this scene that flash yearly across the nation's television and movie screens, the triumph of virtue is all but inevitable — particularly when virtue is embodied in the lank form of Cinemactor John Wayne. In 24 years of moviemaking, during which he has played some 150 imperceptible variations of the same role, Actor Wayne, a limber-lumbering 6 ft. 4 in. man with a leathery skin and eyes like a sad and friendly hound, has become almost a trademark of manly incorruptibility.
In film after film, Wayne has larned the bad 'uns that villainy don't pay. In Stagecoach, possibly the best western picture ever made, he laid low two badmen with his trusty Winchester, reloading for the second kill as he dived to the ground to dodge the bullets of the first. As a white-clad lieutenant in a picture called Seven Sinners, he managed, by sheer force of innocence and a trusting heart, to turn a bedizened sinner (Marlene Dietrich) into a good woman and to preserve the honor of the U.S. Navy as well. Only very rarely is Wayne shown to be mortal—or at any rate expendable—as in the bloody Sands of Iwo Jima (1950). But even on
Iwo, his sterling example (with an assist from the U.S. Marine Corps) assured a victory for the right side.
To millions of moviegoers and televiewers, in whose private lives good & evil often wage dreary, inconclusive little wars, John Wayne's constant re-enactment of the triumph of virtue is as reassuring as George Washington's face on a Series E bond. And virtue, in Wayne's case, brings just as solid returns. This year, for the second year in a row, the Motion Picture Herald poll of U.S. theater owners and exhibitors showed John Wayne the country's top box-office draw. When a breathless pressagent first called to tell him the great news, Wayne's modest response was characteristic. "Why?" he drawled.
Why, Indeed? It was a good question. Why does the U.S. public like him better than Betty Grable, Bing Crosby or Martin & Lewis? His legs are not as pretty as Betty's; his voice is not as sweet as Bing's; he is nowhere near as funny as Martin & Lewis. And he is not the best of Hollywood's actors. In fact, it is an open question whether he can act at all. "How often do I gotta tell you (thus Wayne to a persistent interviewer) that I don't act at all—I re-act." By this, Wayne means that on the set he responds to a cue precisely as he would in his own backyard, regardless of what the script and the director may say. John Wayne, at 44, is 1) a businessman who firmly believes in the profitable product he sells, and 2) a craftsman who has learned his trade.