For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and 'They Were Expendable' Part 5

“I was just the paint for the palettes of Ford and Hawks.”

— John Wayne —

John Wayne was still young in 1944, only thirty-eight years old. And yet the major elements of his inimitable style were hardening into place. Perhaps no other actor in history has been so cognizant of using his body to express grand themes and timeless mythological underpinnings. Under Ford’s direction Wayne never just stands there, he poses, in ways and with effects that conjure up famous paintings and sculpture. When he fills the frame as Lieutenant Junior Grade Rusty Ryan in They Were Expendable, he becomes every man who ever fought a losing action in a war, who faced defeat with stoicism, who sacrificed for a greater good. In the history of film, John Wayne remains nonpareil in his use of presence to project subtext.

Little of that came naturally to the Duke — in his early films he’s tall and rangy and handsome, but with little of the gravity, focus, and dramatic weight that would come to typify his prime acting years. Those skills, and they were skills, were consciously learned over fifteen years of working with Ford and his old troupe of veteran actors. He watched the way they walked and carried themselves, studied the way they were directed, and began to divine the level of nuance Ford demanded. There’s a funny story from the making of Stagecoach (1939, John Wayne’s big coming-out party as an actor), where Wayne’s character was supposed to be washing his face after a hard day, and Ford started smacking him around screaming, “Christ Duke, wash you face like a man! You’re daubing it! You’re daubing it!” He was trying to teach Wayne that, when you are an actor in front of a camera, your every movement can and should mean something deeper than what is on the surface. The act of washing one’s face can be pedestrian, or it can be a sweeping gesture that evokes strength of character, or a relaxed demeanor, or a gentleness of heart. And those deft movements will unconsciously fire off all sorts of neurons in the brain of an audience.

When you watch They Were Expendable, pay close attention to John Wayne. Look how he stands in each shot compared to others in the frame, how he inevitably comes across as more interesting than everyone else, more classically posed. Notice the way his hands are often planted on his hips, his elbows flared wide. The way his chest is thrust out like a peacock. The way he keeps his face turned down and glares out at people from under dark eyebrows. The way he wrinkles his forehead with weariness and, without blinking, gazes out into space with a thousand-yard stare that looks as if he has all the pain of the war bottled within. Other, supposedly more accomplished actors would go toe-to-toe with Duke in a scene, and he would often just mop the floor with them, blowing them off the screen with a look or a gesture.

To this day, leftists regularly embarrass themselves with the argument that the Duke’s lack of a war record disqualifies him from being an on-screen exemplar of cherished American values. The notion that an actor must actually be in real life whatever he’s portraying on screen is idiotic. Wayne was never a real-life war hero, granted. But neither was he the draft-dodging hypocrite of liberal fever-swamp fantasies. A May 1942 letter exists of Wayne almost begging John Ford to pull strings to get him into his Field Photo unit:

Have you any suggestions on how I should get in? Can I get assigned to your outfit, and if I could, would you want me? How about the Marines? You have Army and Navy men under you. Have you any Marines or how about a Seabee or what would you suggest or would you? No, I’m not drunk. I just hate to ask favors, but for Christ sake you can suggest, can’t you?. . .No kidding, coach, who’ll I see?

Meanwhile Herbert Yates, the head of Republic Pictures, continually requested deferments for Wayne in a desperate effort to keep his main action star on the lot. Studios like M-G-M could let a dozen headliners go off to fight and still have a vast stable of bankable names to draw on. A tiny second-rate outfit like Republic, on the other hand, had none to spare. Yates’ biggest moneymaker, Gene Autry, had already abandoned his contract to enlist, meaning that in 1942 and 1943 the only Republic films to become Top Twenty box-office hits starred John Wayne.

One review from the period noted, “John Wayne is a rudimentary actor, but he has the look and bearing, unusual for his trade, of a capable human male. . . he is able to make his habitual inarticulateness suggest the uncommunicative competence that men expect in their leaders.” At a time when President Roosevelt was making patriotic films a top priority (wartime theater attendance had skyrocketed from fifty million people a week to more than ninety million), Wayne was one of the only guys left in Hollywood able to pull them off and make them hits (Humphrey Bogart being another).

“You should have thought about all that before you signed a new contract!” Yates said when Wayne asked to be allowed to enlist. “If you don’t live up to it, I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got! I’ll sue you for every penny you hope to make in the future!” For the Duke — who grew up poor and ever worried about returning to those circumstances — it was a terrifying threat. He was not yet a star on the level of a Gable or Stewart or Fonda (or even a Robert Montgomery, who in 1945 got paid $170,000 for They Were Expendable compared to Wayne’s $80.000). John Ford’s grandson Dan, a veteran in his own right, later mused that

It must have weighed heavily on him which way to go. But here was his chance and he knew it. He was an action leading man, and there were a lot of roles for him to play. There was a lot of work in A movies, and this was a guy who had made eighty B movies. He had finally moved up to the first rank. He was in the right spot at the right time with the right qualities and willing to work hard. Would I have done any different? The answer is hell no.

Soon, Yates was making money with Wayne not only by starring him in Republic films, but by loaning him out to other studios, all of whom were suffering from their own leading man shortages. Wayne worked relentlessly, averaging four movies a year. At the behest of Mary Ford, he would come to the Hollywood Canteen after hours and wash dishes, bus tables, and carve turkeys. Between films in late 1943, he embarked on a three-month, two-shows-a-day USO tour across the South Pacific. The experience made a deep impression on him. “They’ll build stages out of old crates,” he reverently noted after one trip, “then sit in mud and rain for three hours waiting for someone like me to say ‘Hello, Joe’.”

The war ending without his having enlisted would haunt Wayne’s conscience for the rest of his life. In hindsight, a large part of his later career can be seen as a sincere effort to make amends by doing our troops proud via the art of filmmaking.

John Ford’s disgust with Wayne’s lack of military experience has been grossly over-exaggerated, but he did add it to his tool chest of things used to get a rise out of his protégé or, in extreme cases, bring him to tears. During the filming of They Were Expendable, after several takes of Robert Montgomery and Wayne saluting a departing general, Ford broke out with, “Duke — can’t you manage a salute that at least looks as though you’ve been in the service?” Crestfallen and shattered, Wayne walked off of a set for the only time in his life. Montgomery, who served with distinction throughout the war, walked up to Ford, put his hands on the arms of the director’s chair, and with steel in his voice said, “Don’t you ever speak to anyone like that again.” When he further insisted that Ford find Wayne and apologize, Montgomery remembers that, “[Ford] blustered at first — ‘I’m not going to apologize to that son of a bitch. . .’; then he came out with a lot of phony excuses — ‘What did I say? I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings.’ He ended up crying.”

But if the grizzled director sometimes drove the Duke to fits of despair, he far more often elevated him to the heights of cinema legend. Few anecdotes illustrate this more profoundly than the tale behind the nostalgic tune featured so memorably in They Were Expendable, “Marchéta.” Pronounced Mar-KEE-ta, it’s a 1913 “love song of Old Mexico” written by the American composer Victor Schertzinger when he was but 25 years old. Some thirty years after the song became a well-loved standard, Ford made “Marchéta” one of the emotional linchpins of his 1945 film.

All the versions of “Marchéta” to be found on modern CDs are either overwrought ballads by male vocalists like Al Jolson and Mario Lanza, or else corny “cha-cha” dance instrumentals. However, when played in sleepy waltz-time it becomes an achingly beautiful theme. It is first played (and the lyrics quietly sung by the assembled crowd) when Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) attends a hospital dance on Corregidor, in the Philippines, and falls in love with a nurse there. Much later in the movie Bataan falls, and Corregidor (where his lover is stationed) is being bombed and starved into submission by the Japanese. As Wayne gets drunk in an island bar, a poignant reprise of the melody appears on the radio. Without a single word of dialogue or explanation, Wayne gazes off into space, and as the music plays we recognize it from before, and realize he is remembering that wonderful evening spent dancing in the darkness with a doomed woman he’ll never see again:

[youtube oCGD6rX3GNc — click here to watch in full-screen HD]

—

The song is utilized expertly in Expendable, and would stick with John Wayne for the rest of his life. Ford, you see, had an accordionist friend named Danny Borzage, who would often play mood music to help the actors find the right emotional timbre for a scene. (In fact, Borzage can be seen on-screen in many of Ford’s films — in They Were Expendable, look for him under the floorboards of a hut providing musical accompaniment to Ward Bond’s serenade of Donna Reed.) Whenever John Ford or a member of his stock company appeared on-set for the day’s work, Borzage would also play favored themes — different for each person — to announce their arrival. Over time, his presence and these songs became a grand and well-loved tradition on Ford’s sets, creating a palpable sense of family amongst the cast and crew.

After They Were Expendable, “Marchéta” became John Wayne’s aural signature, lovingly warbled on Danny Borzage’s accordion each morning to herald the arrival of the Duke. It’s a beautiful melody, laden with nostalgia, and deserves to be remembered far better than it has been.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we focus on some of the other members of the John Ford Stock Company who appeared in They Were Expendable, along with a pair of prominent non-Fordian actors who helped greatly to make the movie special.

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and 'They Were Expendable' Part 5

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