WAYNE AND FORD

Biography of the two figures, actor and director, who defined the Western film genre.

John Wayne (1907-1979) started in film, as Schoenberger (English and Creative Writing/Coll. of William and Mary; Dangerous Muse: A Life of Caroline Blackwood, 2001, etc.) observes, as a “mere stagehand.” However, by the time director John Ford (1894-1973) caught up to him, he had already made a few small films as a lead or supporting actor—unsuccessfully, to be sure. Tyrannical and exacting—and, the author posits late in the book, tied up in knots by sexual-identity insecurity—Ford led Wayne to stardom through seven major Westerns, including Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that are held up today as canonical. Ford’s contributions were many. Apart from the technical aspects of his directorial work, he also had a nuanced sense of storytelling and of the grays between the black and white edges of morality that made his films more interesting than those Wayne made on his own, such as the simple-minded epics The Green Berets and The Alamo, “derailed by his ultrapatriotism,” Schoenberger remarks while enumerating the masculine-virtue qualities Ford helped Wayne express. “No other director and actor created the ideal of the American hero more than Ford and Wayne,” writes the author, going on to illustrate her case with those major films while noting other waypoints in Wayne’s career, such as Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys and Don Siegel’s The Shootist—both films in which Wayne’s character dies, something contemporary audiences didn’t much care for. Allowing that she is “not alone among women” in enjoying Westerns, Schoenberger serves up an intelligently crafted narrative that never runs as deep as it might. For that, readers are better served by Scott Eyman’s John Wayne (2013) and especially Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers (2014), the latter of which covers much of the same ground more compellingly.

There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but compleatist fans of Wayne and Ford will enjoy revisiting the films discussed.