American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (67 page)

23
  Some but not all the scenes for the American version were shot only in Grandeur and then trimmed to fit the standard format. There were actually several more foreign versions made of the film. Fox jobbed out the shooting script to France, where it was directed by Pierre Couderc. The Spanish version was directed by Walsh, David Howard, and Samuel Schneider. There was also a separate Italian version. In the early 1980s, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City acquired the original 65 mm nitrate camera negative for The Big Trail and wanted to restore the film, but the negative was too fragile. They then took it to Karl Malkames, a cinematographer and a specialist and pioneer in film reproduction, restoration, and preservation. He designed and built a special printer to handle the careful frame-by-frame reproduction of the negative to an anamorphic (CinemaScope) fine grain master. A two-disc DVD version of the restored film was released in the United States on May 13, 2008, followed by a Blu-ray edition in September 2012.

24
  Girls Demand Excitement exists in an unreleased print held by UCLA.

25
  Three Girls Lost is available on DVD.

26
  Originally called CBS Film Sales Corporation, and disparagingly referred to as “Corn beef and cabbage” among the other studio heads, Brandt left over differences with the brothers. Harry Cohn then became the sole head of the renamed Columbia Pictures.

27
  Also known as Arizona, the title of the August Thomas Broadway play it was based on. Riskin would go on to write many of Frank Capra’s Columbia films and marry Fay Wray, of King Kong fame. No DVD is currently available.

28
  In his biography of Wayne, Zolotow claims his friend was innocent of any philandering and that the unnamed starlet had made up the stories about her affair with the Duke to make Cohn jealous.

29
  Jones had toiled in a series of westerns at Fox that were considered secondary to the Mix films they made. The low point of his career is generally considered to be the films he made at Columbia. Range Feud may be downloaded for free from the Internet.

30
  A.k.a. Yellow. Makers of Men is available on DVD.

31
  Texas Cyclone is available on DVD.

32
  All twelve episodes of Shadow of the Eagle may be seen on YouTube.

33
  The Hurricane Express is available for free download at the Internet Archive, FreeMooviesOnline.com, Amazon, and YouTube.

34
  Josephine became Josie Morrison, as “John Wayne” was not his legal name.

35
  They include Stephen Roberts’s Lady and the Gent, 1932 (Paramount Pictures); D. Ross Lederman’s Two-Fisted Law, 1932 (Columbia Pictures); Fred Allen’s Ride Him, Cowboy, 1932 (Warner Bros); Tenny Wright’s The Big Stampede, 1932; Tenny Wright’s Telegraph Trail, 1932 (Warner Bros); William Wellman’s Central Airport, 1933 (First National); Philip Whitman’s His Private Secretary, 1933 (Showmen’s Pictures); Mack V. Wright’s Somewhere in Sonora, 1933 (Warner Bros); Armand Schaefer and Colbert Clark’s The Three Musketeers (a.k.a. Desert Command), 1933 (Mascot Picture Corporation); Alfred E. Green’s Baby Face, 1933 (Warner Bros); and Mack V. Wright’s The Man from Monterey, 1933 (Warner Bros).

36
  A.k.a. The Kid’s Last Fight. The film was remade in 1938 as the better-known They Made Me a Criminal, directed by Archie Mayo, starring John Garfield. Life of Jimmy Dolan is in the public domain and available on DVD.

37
  Riders of Destiny is available on DVD, and from several download sites on the Internet. It is also available as part of a recent collection of John Wayne westerns, The John Wayne Western Collection (2009), that includes: Blue Steel, Winds of the Wasteland, The Dawn Rider, Randy Rides Alone, The Lawless Frontier, Paradise Canyon, Sagebrush Trail, The Star Packer, The Trail Beyond, The Man from Utah, Mclintock! (Widescreen Edition), Angel and the Badman, Rainbow Valley, Riders of Destiny, The Lucky Texan, Hell Town, ’Neath the Arizona Skies, West of the Divide, The Desert Trail, and Texas Terror.

38
  Wayne’s voice was originally dubbed by a baritone studio singer, an uneasy fit and an obvious poor match due to Wayne’s naturally high-pitched speaking voice. Autry had also worked for Mascot and had had a successful recording career before he became Hollywood’s favorite singing cowboy.

39
  Wayne finished out his original contract with Monogram for eight films, averaging one a month, and then reprised his “Singing Sandy Saunders” in at least one more film (for some reason, Sandy became Randy), 1934’s Randy Rides Alone, directed by Harry Fraser, costarring Gabby Hayes and Yak Canutt. For reasons not clear, but likely had to do with Wayne’s attraction to Cecilia, Alberta Vaughn was a last-minute replacement for Parker as his fade-out love interest/kiss partner. After Republic bought out Monogram, Yates continued to use Gene Autry as his studio’s resident singing cowboy. John Wayne never sang atop a horse again.

40
  In 1934, Ford was appointed a lieutenant in the United States Reserve, and it is believed he used The Araner to help gather intelligence for the navy under the guise of its being a pleasure boat.

41
  Kennedy formed RKO in 1928 with David Sarnoff.

42
  Although The Informer won Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenwriter, and Best Score, it was widely believed that the vengeful Louis B. Mayer used his influence within the Academy to have them give the Best Picture Oscar to his Mutiny on the Bounty.

43
  There are conflicting reports about what actually happened. According to Dan Ford, the director’s grandson and biographer, it happened; according to McBride, Ford kept his post until 1938, when he was elected to the SDG board of directors, and remained a major figure in the guild for the rest of his professional life. The guild’s records are unclear about whether or not Ford was actually voted out of office.

44
  Technically, Yates retained the option exclusive rights to use Wayne in westerns only for Republic.

45
  Zolotow points out that Wayne’s drinking also served as something of an escape from his increasingly unhappy marriage to Josephine, who considered him not just a failure, but a failure in a field that was unworthy of her.

46
  A.k.a. Casey of the Coast Guard, the film was shot in two weeks on a budget of $75,000 ($65,000 was put up by Universal, Carr Productions put in the last $10,000). The Sea Spoilers is available on DVD.

47
  A.k.a. The Showdown. Based on the Jack London short story “The Abysmal Brute,” shot for $75,000. Conflict is available on DVD.

48
  California Straight Ahead is available on DVD.

49
  I Cover the War is available on DVD.

50
  A.k.a. Hell on Ice, Idol of the Crowds is available on DVD.

51
  Adventure’s End is not available on DVD, but may be seen in its entirety on YouTube.

52
  “Boule de Suif” is de Maupassant’s most famous short story. Published in 1880, translated as “Dumpling,” or “Butterball,” or “Ball of Lard,” it was one of his collection of stories set in the Franco-Prussian War. Ten residents of Rouen, recently occupied by the Prussian Army, decide to escape, by covered wagon, to Le Havre, still free. The wagon’s passengers are a microcosm of French society. De Maupassant’s story is itself loosely derived from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Ford was already familiar with “Boule de Suif” and had wanted long wanted to make a film of it, but couldn’t come up with workable concept until Haycox’s adaptation appeared in Collier’s. Some have questioned “Boule de Suif” as the source of the Haycox story and suggest it is actually derived from Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” a story Ford first adapted into a silent western in 1919, starring Harry Carey.

53
  The eleven-year gap was the largest in Ford’s filmography without a western. Of the more than two hundred feature films Ford directed, fifty-four, fully a quarter, were westerns.

54
  Stagecoach is available on DVD and may also be seen in its entirety on YouTube.

55
  Wanger put up $250,000, a little more than half the film’s budget. Universal put up the rest, in return for distribution rights.

56
  Cooper’s price in 1939 was $150,000 a picture.

57
  In an undated profile of Yakima Canutt, AP writer Bob Thomas wrote about Canutt’s stunt work in Stagecoach: “The stunts . . . had the beauty and precision of a ballet filled with danger.” According to Zolotow, Wayne did some of the stunt work as well. When Walter Wanger saw him jumping onto the top of the stagecoach, he was, reportedly, horrified. Wayne later told a reporter, “Hell, he didn’t know I’d been doing stunts like that for years, just for eatin’ money.”—quoted by Dick O’Conner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, January 5, 1954.

58
  In his interview/study of John Ford, Peter Bogdanovich asked the director how he came to use Monument Valley in Stagecoach. Ford said, “I knew about it. I had travelled up there once, driving through Arizona on my way to Santa Fe, New Mexico.”—Bogdanovich, John Ford, pp. 69–70. However, John Wayne contradicts in Roberts/Olson, [Wayne] “claimed Monument Valley was his discovery, one he had made in the late 1930’s when he was working as a prop man on a George O’Brien film. Duke said that he had told Ford about the location before filming started on Stagecoach, and that once the director saw the valley he immediately jumped Wayne’s claim of discovery.” Roberts/Olson also claim that Ford once gave credit to Harry Goulding, who had a trading post there, and it was Goulding who first suggested Monument Valley as a location. Roberts/Olson cite the following sources: John Ford, Directors in Action, Todd McCarthy, John Ford and Monument Valley, Ronald L. Davis, John Ford, Hollywood’s Old Master.

59
  Stagecoach also lost Best Editing (Otho Lovering, Dorothy Spencer) to Gone with the Wind (Hal C. Kern and James E. Newcom), Art Direction (Alexander Touboff) to Gone with the Wind (Lyle Wheeler), and Black and White Cinematography (Bert Glennon) to Wuthering Heights (Gregg Toland). It also won Scoring: Original Song Score and/or Adaptation (Richard Hageman, W. Franke Harling, John Leopold, Leo Shuken).

60
  All are available in DVD. All films going forward have been released in DVD.

61
  Rogers was brought in by Republic to replace Gene Autry, who was serving in the armed forces, and quickly became Republic’s biggest star. Autry remained number two, Wayne number three. Yates had suspended Autry’s contract during the war and held him to it, and he was never again able to gain his traction at Republic. He eventually left and formed his own film company, which distributed through Columbia.

62
  The plays, written between 1913 and 1917, include The Moon of the Caribees, In the Zone, Bound East for Cardiff, and The Long Voyage Home.

63
  During filming Wayne had an intense sexual affair with Osa Massen, a gorgeous Danish actress Feldman had hired to help Wayne learn how to sound Swedish.

64
  “She’d slept with [Jimmy Stewart] from day one. It was a dream: it had been magical. For him, too. Suddenly, she was able to speak about it. It had all been poetic and romantic, hour by hour. That had held her bound to him, making her happy and unhappy . . . She had become pregnant by him the first time they’d slept together . . . she didn’t want to abort the child, in order to continue sleeping with him. But she gave in to his wishes.”—From the published diaries of German novelist Erich Maria Remarque regarding Marlene Dietrich’s affair with Stewart. Remarque and Dietrich were romantically involved during this period.

65
  The anecdote and quote appear in several sources. Bach qualifies it by noting the line is from Somerset Maugham’s The Circle, a play Dietrich once had performed in early in her career. She was, likely, making fun of Garnett, who had no idea the line wasn’t real or original, when she exaggerated her initial attraction to Wayne. Universal had wanted Tyrone Power to costar with Dietrich, but she vetoed the choice. It’s also likely that Zanuck wouldn’t loan out Power, who was under contract to Twentieth Century–Fox.

66
  Seven Sinners is available on DVD, alone and as part of several different Wayne collections, including one from Turner Classic Movies.

67
  Dietrich biographer Stephen Bach doubts the veracity of the “love affair” and quotes Dietrich as describing Wayne as “[n]ot a bright or exciting type, not exactly brilliant, but neither was he bad,” and he doubts Zolotow’s quote by Dietrich that she found Wayne “an actor who was an animal, an animal of honor and dignity.” The other thing to consider with Dietrich was that all these affairs coincided with the movies she made and could very well have been orchestrated by the studios. The only problem with that theory is that Dietrich never listened to anything the studios or anyone said when it came to her career or sex life. What cannot be doubted is that Wayne was totally taken with Dietrich.

68
  Zolotow erroneously reported the film being shot “in beautiful black and white.” He may have confused it with The Big Trail, which was shot in black-and-white.

69
  In her memoir, Pilar Wayne writes that Chata “claimed to be an actress. In fact she was a high-class call girl . . . and Milland was one of her [regular] clients . . . Chata was the exact opposite of church-going, ladylike Josephine. Duke . . . lusted for Chata. She was vivacious, blatantly sexual and voluptuous, a combination that was guaranteed to make her a perfect companion for an emotionally repressed man.”—from John Wayne: My Life with the Duke, p. 45.