Word: western
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Part 3 became the cornerstone of the Wayne tradition. "When I came in," he claims, "the western man never lost his white hat and always rode the white horse and waited for the man to get up again in the fight. Following my Dad's advice, if a guy hit me with a vase, I'd hit him with a chair. That's the way we played it. I changed the saintly Boy Scout of the original cowboy hero into a more normal kind of fella...
...became Big Duke, and the sobriquet stuck. By 30, Big Duke was a looming figure of contained violence waiting for a place to let loose. "I was in a saloon once where a guy shot all the way down a bar," he once complained to a director during a western fight scene. "And I wanna tell you, those extras aren't moving fast enough." The trick was to release the violence in neighborhood theaters. But somehow the oversized part continued to elude the outsized Wayne. The first picture he made for Monogram literally took place in a one-horse town...
...could and yes, he did. The film became a classic of the genre, and Wayne changed to archetype casting. Following the wheel marks of Stagecoach, he became the essential western man, fearin' God but no one else. Tough to men and kind to wimmin, slow to anger but duck behind the bar when he got mad, for he had a gun and a word that never failed...
...films of the westerner have seldom been sullied with fact. As Historian Joseph Rosa showed in The Gunfighter: Man or Myth? (TIME, May 16), "the so-called 'Western Code' never really existed. Men bent on killing did so in the most efficient and expeditious way they knew how. Jesse James was shot in the back. Billy the Kid died as he entered a darkened room. Wild Bill Hickok was shot from behind while he was playing poker. In each case the victim had no chance to defend himself...
...matter. In the province of the Old West, truth is a dude. The good and bad men who belong are necessary fantasies of the national mind. The public pays to see the Wayne western as a native morality play. The greatest good vanquishes the deepest evil and walks into the gaudiest sunset. The difference between Wayne and his audience is that they leave the illusion behind when they exit from the theater. The Duke has always taken it home with...