Waiting for a John Wayne Moment

Oct. 30 —  We spent a lot of Saturday afternoons at the movies, my father and I. He was a Danish immigrant eager to soak up as much of this country as he could in double-feature doses, and I was a boy who had yet to fall under baseball’s spell. The cowboys and fighting men on a patched screen in a second-run theater held me in thrall and shaped a sensibility that, for better or worse, stays with me to this day. In our upside-down world, with terrorists and anthrax-tainted mail and a madman in a cave preaching holy war, I keep waiting for the next John Wayne moment.

DAN RATHER GAVE it the best shot I’m aware of thus far, refusing to be tested for anthrax on the grounds that doing so would be caving in to the cowards who would kill us with microbes. It was one of those hardheaded, crazy-brave gestures that John Wayne’s movies taught us to embrace. I doubt it’s a coincidence that Rather is a product of the same generation I am, the one that grew up thinking the Duke won World War II.
       And I’ll tell you who else probably spent his childhood believing that Wayne could pull the pin out of a hand grenade with his teeth: President Bush. In light of that, one of the few Republicans I count as a friend has spent every day since Sept. 11 wishing that Bush hadn’t let the Secret Service play hide-and-seek with him while the world spun off its axis.

 

        What my friend wanted the president to do was to drag a chair onto the White House lawn, park himself in it and shout, “Here I am, you butchers! Take your best shot!”
       But the only president we’ve ever had who was capable of a grandstand play like that was Teddy Roosevelt, and with all due respect to him and Bush, this really isn’t about politicians. It’s about finding someone who will be John Wayne for the 21st century, a hero spun from myth who can put a little of the swagger back in our step by spitting metaphorically in Osama bin Laden’s eye.
       
DITHERING IN HOLLYWOOD
       In Hollywood, however, the people in charge of the search are dithering the way their predecessors didn’t after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Movies that seem perfect for a time when patriotism is fashionable again have been pushed back in the schedule. We won’t see “Behind Enemy Lines,” about an American pilot downed in the Balkans, until January. And it will be spring before we lay eyes on two World War II dramas, “Hart’s War,” which takes us from a P.O.W. camp to a court martial, and “Windtalkers,” the story of how Navajo Marines in the Pacific used their native tongue to send secret radio messages.

       The logic for these delay tactics is that the studios want to see how the public reacts to having real-life soldiers in harm’s way before it lets any bullets fly at their cinematic equivalents. Thanks for your sensitivity, Mr. and Mrs. Studio Chief, but when we started fighting for our lives in Europe and the Pacific, the old guard showed no such reluctance about marching into the propaganda fray.
       Before America knew it, Robert Taylor was the last Yankee standing in “Bataan,” blasting away at an enemy that was sure to kill him, underscoring his defiance by yelling, “Come on, you dirty . . .” Defeat likewise became a moral victory in “Wake Island,” with Brian Donlevy shouting, “Send more ——!” as he died a hero. And, of course, John Wayne was along shortly in “Flying Tigers,” “The Fighting Seabees,” “Back to Bataan” and “They Were Expendable.” He even got killed as a Seabee, shot by a sniper before he plowed his bulldozer into a fuel tank and went out in a blaze of glory.

       But the dying scene everybody remembers is the one in “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” There’s the Duke, his latest campaign won, offering his men a smoke as Old Glory is being planted on Mount Suribachi — and BANG! a sniper shoots him in the back. It’s a moment so startlingly real that it has all but erased my memories of “Operation Pacific” and “Flying Leathernecks,” the two other combat movies he made after the hostilities had ended.
       And yet I treasure an earlier scene in “Sands” every bit as much, though it says more about Wayne as a screen presence than it does about men at war. The Marines of 1st Squad are preparing for their assault on Iwo, and they’re wondering about the sergeant who’s going to lead them, the man they will come to know as Stryker. Where is he? they ask. And Wayne steps into the tent and says, as only he could, “He’s here.”
       
POWER OF JOHN WAYNE
       Just those two words and the picture is his. That was the power of John Wayne. He had the delivery to go with his size, his walk, his way of raising an eyebrow to win a woman’s heart or warn a troublemaker that his mouth better not be writing a check his fists couldn’t cash. Never mind that Wayne wheedled and caviled and took advantage of his fame to stay out of the war he fought on the screen. “Dammit,” said director Raoul Walsh, “the son of a bitch looked like a man.”
       They still make movie stars who fit that description — Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Robert Redford — but they’ve never made one who fills the screen the way Wayne did. Maybe that’s another reason why movies about the war on terrorism, itself still new and cloaked in government secrecy, will be slow in coming. Today’s Hollywood doesn’t breed he-men with staying power the way it does actors who can turn neuroses into art. And it’s no time for neurotics.

The country is hunkered down in a foxhole of fear, and it needs someone on the big screen to remind us that we’re better than that. If a larger-than-life figure doesn’t step forward to give us a John Wayne moment, I’m perfectly willing to turn back to John Wayne himself. For all his personal hypocrisy, for all his irredeemable politics during Vietnam, he still strikes a chord that is resoundingly American when he lives again in those old movies. They are the movies I find myself hungering for now, and every time I begin to wonder if that’s somehow wrong or even crazy, I know what the Duke would have said: Not hardly

-courtesy of MSNBC

 

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