John Wayne, who would have turned 100 years old next Saturday, left behind a body of work as intimidating and as massive as his screen persona. He worked in more than 70 pictures, a few of them great, some of his presence. Twenty-eight years have passed since his death, and there his films only because he's in it.
Little wonder, then, that Wayne's centenary popularity. Movie stars used to offer their audiences guides for behavior and, as a result, there's likely to be a little John Wayne in all of us - and, yes, I'm including women, unless (hear my inner Wayne talking) you want to make something out of it. Even those who eschewed Wayne's right-wing politics, notably such 1960s rebels as Abbie Hoffman and Phil Ochs, admitted digging the Duke.
No record exists as to whether the compliment was returned in kind. (The guess here: Likely not.) Still, the fact that Wayne's two best performances - Ethan Edwards in "The there was some elbow room in Wayne's own purported obstinacy.
One always stand removed from that massive, intimidating persona he helped create and give To be sure, he could always make crafty fun of his screen image - and, as the best actor Oscar he won for 1969's "True Grit" proved, benefit from the experience. Curiously, many of the special DVD packages coming out this week in celebration of Wayne's 100th seem to be more in tribute of Wayne's humorous, "True Grit," for example, is available in a two-disc "collector's edition" from Paramount Home Video (which offers almost 20 "John Wayne Collection" DVDs, including 1954's "The High and the Mighty," 1963's "McClintock!" and the 1976 Wayne's performance as dissolute, grouchy, one-eyed Sheriff Rooster Cogburn seems even now to have been calculated as Academy Award bait since it seems, on the outside, to be such a colorful stretch.
It's still an engaging Cogburn to track down the man who killed her father, Glen Campbell as a preening Texas Ranger, and Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Corey and Jeremy Slate as the outlaws. But in retrospect, Cogburn, whatever his quirky charms, "Rio Bravo," available this week in a two-disc special edition from Warner Home Video, was pretty much passed over by the Academy Awards when it came out in 1959. Since then, its subtler comic graces have come to be appreciated amid its archetypal Western shoot-'em-up trappings.
And Wayne's performance as Sheriff John T. Chance, the crusty lawman who insists on battling marauding gunmen on his own, grows with each viewing as the kind of sly self-mockery Martin, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan and Angie Dickinson, the sole living member of the leads, speaking here in new interviews. Of the new Wayne DVD packages, the most curious has to be "The John Wayne Film Collection," also from Warner.
Six films, available for the first time on DVD, are contained in this boxed set, including a couple of romantic comedies, fare one immediately associates with Wayne, but he carries himself in each with 1942's "Reunion in France." And in 1939's "Allegheny Uprising," Wayne leads a McClain," an over-the-top, red-baiting 1952 thriller which shows how funny Wayne could be even when he wasn't trying. Watching Wayne's eponymous federal of "commie" subversives comes within reach of the highest camp.
("House Un-American Activities Committee!" he barks at one point. "Let us through!
!") And yet Wayne can't help leveling things a little here, saying nice things questions. For some, such mitigating circumstances may be too much or not enough.
But, as Wayne himself might say, what's it to you? Here, in no particular order, are some John Wayne Western DVDs worthy of a The Searchers (Warner Bros.) - Available in several versions, John Ford's using a gang of 11 schoolkids to help him get his livestock to market.
In this 1972 film, the incomparable Bruce Dern is the no-good scoundrel who ...
well, if you haven't seen it, don't expect us to spoil it. Stagecoach (Warner Bros.
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