Hollywood has seen a number of iconic stars grace its Walk of Fame across the years. However, many can’t compare to the might of John Wayne, an American screen icon whose relevance transcended cinema itself. Since those halcyon days, Wayne’s character off-screen has been repeatedly called into question.
His uber conservative outlook on life may have made him distasteful to some during the 1950s, as cinema went on a Communist hunt, but his outright abhorrent racist views have left his legacy tattered in today’s society. But, while we must honour those views, it doesn’t take away from the impact Wayne had on filmmaking. A hero of western cinema, Wayne triumphed in the genre, with his dominance only being matched by the likes of Clint Eastwood, James Stewart, Gary Cooper and Charles Bronson.
Yet, Wayne wasn’t always the screen star we know him as today. Just like every industry actor, he had to start somewhere. Taking to the silver screen back in the 1920s, Wayne appeared in a number of uncredited roles before making his first major starring role in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 movie The Big Trail. Indeed, whilst the actor might be known for his collaborations with the likes of John Ford and Howard Hawks, his early career was stuffed full of middling genre flicks.
In the years that followed, Wayne was moulded by the industry into a prospect for the future, with many of his characters being based on the past western icon Ken Maynard. Wanting easy, quick western hits, Warner Bros approached Wayned to make six movies that would help him establish his identity as an icon of the genre. In each film, he would be paid $1,500, and his character name would be ‘John’.
Though it was a formative period for Wayne as an actor, Wayne wasn’t best pleased with this deal, especially as Warner Bros cared little about artistic integrity, with many of the movies being based on old Maynard flicks. He may have ended up as a seemingly movable object in terms of adding to a narrative, but Wayne truly cared about cinema.
Speaking in Michael Munn’s John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, Wayne discussed this deal, as well as his work with the Looney Tunes producer Leon Schlesinger, who also produced many of these westerns.
“I later thought Leon’s cartoons were better than the horse operas he put me in,” Wayne stated in the book with a vicious intent, “Those westerns I made at Warner Bros. were remakes of old Ken Maynard films, and all the big scenes like cattle herds and Indian attacks were taken straight from the original Maynard films”.
Continuing, he further voiced his frustration, adding: “So, I had to dress up to look like Ken Maynard because a lot of the old footage they inserted had shots of Maynard in the distance. I really hated that”. The truth is, even by these early movies, Wayne had begun to voice his opinions and find out the peaks and torughs of working in cinema.
Eventually, after many years of hard work, Wayne collaborated with John Ford for 1939’s Stagecoach, sparking a much-celebrated partnership with the director. From the 1940s to the early 1980s, the pair would work on such classics as The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Fort Apache, with Wayne later becoming the Hollywood template for success, much like how Maynard had been in the past. Take a look at a clip from Wayne’s first starring role in The Big Trail below.