American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  PRIOR TO AMERICA’S ENTRY INTO World War II, Hollywood’s feature films increasingly focused on the theme of the coming world war, although, for a number of reasons (including the United States’ official position of neutrality), most films that were about America’s immediate future were set safely in America’s past. Allegheny Uprising, The Dark Command, and Wayne’s next film for Republic, 1940’s Three Faces West, were politically motivated, made to justify America’s entry into the war.

  Three Faces West, directed by Bernard Vorhaus, starred Wayne opposite Sigrid Gurie as Lenchen “Leni” Braun, the daughter of a Viennese refugee, Dr. Karl Braun. Gurie had replaced Trevor after the Wayne/Trevor screen pairing had run its professional and personal courses. The couple’s real-life heat had never fully transferred to the big screen. Moreover, the role of Leni needed someone who could convincingly play Austrian, and that wasn’t Trevor. Small, dark, European, and voluptuous, Gurie more than filled the bill. She was also attracted to Wayne and quickly began an affair with him. According to Zolotow, it was Sigrid who was the aggressor, eager to show the puritanical Wayne the erotic ways of European women. During the three weeks of filming, they carried on an intense sexual affair. Wayne may have thought about extending it, but he was not yet fully willing to let Josephine go, and so, like Trevor, Sigrid Gurie became just one more notch on Wayne’s other six-gun.

  Three Faces West is a film that Roberts and Olson describe as Casablanca meets The Grapes of Wrath, although it is nowhere near as good as either, or the other film it most thematically resembles, Stagecoach. In West, the townspeople of North Dakota, caught in the Dust Bowl drought, are forced to migrate to Oregon, under the guidance of John Phillips (Wayne). Along the way he falls in love with Leni, the refugee doctor’s daughter, still mourning the death of her fiancé, Eric (Roland Varno), who apparently gave his life to help her and her father escape from a concentration camp. Eric then reappears in San Francisco, still alive and a bona fide Nazi. Leni and her father rejoin the wagon train. Freed of her longing for Eric, Leni marries Phillips.

  The German-born director of the film understood well the machinations of his heavy-handed plot, having himself migrated to the United States via England. He felt a personal connection to the telling of this story of refugees and a charming Nazi who manages to slip into the States with nothing but evil on his mind, only to be rejected in favor of the all-American Phillips. Wartime propaganda abounds in Three Faces West as it did in Casablanca and The Grapes of Wrath (but not in Stagecoach).

  Three Faces West, made for $140,000, a fortune by Republic’s standards, earned Wayne $15,000, a relatively large sum of money for him, thanks to Feldman. The film did fairly well, but Vorhaus’s career never took off in America, and after the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) took a second look at Three Faces West and a few of his other efforts, Vorhaus was “outed” as a Communist (films that were anti-Nazi before and during the war were often assumed by HUAC to be too pro-Communist after the war). One of the film’s screenwriters, Samuel Ornitz, a founding member of the Screen Writers Guild, gained fame, or infamy, as one of the notorious “Hollywood Ten,” a group of writers who refused to name names before the committee and were jailed for contempt. Ornitz spent a year in confinement and never again worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

  NOT JUST VORHAUS AND ORNITZ, but everyone’s career in Hollywood, on-screen and off, was about to feel the heat from HUAC, one way or the other. A year before Pearl Harbor, sides were already being chosen up, and an “us”-or-“them” mentality swept through the studios, based as much on economics as politics. There was resistance from the majors to offend Hitler, because a European market hungry for American movies often made the difference between a film making money or losing it. In Three Faces West, the plight of the Dust Bowl refugees trying to flee to California is deepened by the plight of the Europeans trying to escape Hitler by coming to the “New World.” Without the fascist elephant in the room, the film loses its emotional impact. With it, it becomes one of dozens of prewar films that carefully pushed back against European fascism by telling stories set in the past that emphasized earning and defending freedom in America.

  Wayne’s well-known but little-understood activism began in earnest somewhere between Allegheny Uprising and Three Faces West, both films a reflection of the economic turmoil that had hit the film industry during the Depression. In the years following the 1928 collapse of Wall Street, workers of the world were uniting, at least in theory, and in Hollywood the union movement, which had stagnated in the ’20s due to the oppressive domination of the moguls, gained new momentum when those same moguls came up against an enemy they didn’t know how to contain, the extreme faction of an organization that attracted many Hollywood workers, the American Communist Party.

  It’s not clear that on the Communist movement would have gained such a strong hold on Hollywood if the economy had been more stable, or if studio heads had been a little less rigid in their attitude toward their workers; from the starlets they regularly forced onto the casting couches to the scene builders, the prop men (of which Wayne had been one), the actors, the writers, and the directors—they were all treated as factory workers. Even stars were stars only to the public. To the studios they still workers who enjoyed the public acclaim that went with the jobs. For the most part, with few exceptions, directors, cinematographers, and writers were unknown entities to a public whose only interest at the time was simply “Who’s in it?,” not “Who wrote it?” “Who filmed it?” or “Who directed it?”

  When the Screen Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild were formed (along with dozens of lesser organizations that would soon unite under an umbrella called IATSE—the International Alliance of Theatrical State Employees, which included film workers), the red lines were drawn. The moguls claimed they took great care of the people who worked for them (especially those starlets) and that unionism and Communism were ruining America. In Hollywood, they insisted, its influence on union writers and directors was the source of the subliminal messages contained within the films being made. They weren’t completely wrong. In these times of economic discontent and worldwide upheaval and the growing threat of worldwide fascist domination, Communism was for many on the left making movies the only viable alternative to the Fascism of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito.

  Most actors, then and now, if the price is right will do almost anything for a paycheck, from fighting space aliens to dressing up as women if they’re men, or men if they are women. And if there was a subversive element to the films of the ’30s and ’40s, it is more than likely the actors who starred in them were either not aware of it, or if they were, simply didn’t care one way or the other.

  But because few outside the industry knew how films were made, and that most actors were at the bottom of the power ladder, both the public and HUAC saw actors as the real threat. Among the earliest to sense all was not right in La-La Land was John Wayne. During the ’30s, Hollywood was a community of sixty thousand working men, women, and children, most connected in one way or the other to the film industry. By 1935, at the height of the Depression, nearly one-quarter of them had become politicized. As the more conservative management and ownership shifted further to the right, the workers, including actors, tended to move to the left. By 1938, there were powerful, if uneasy alliances in Hollywood within these factions, between New Deal Roosevelt liberals, those caught up with the romance of pre–Hitler-Stalin Pact Communism, and those loyal to America but sympathetic to the left’s desire to better their day-to-day bottom lines.

  Among the most liberal Hollywood players at the time was John Ford, whose 1939–40 post-Stagecoach film trilogy were stories of democracy, destiny, and despair, all starring Henry Fonda in the lead. Two of these films were Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), with Fonda as the youthful, and mythic, man with morals who, at the end of the film, embarks on a journey to meet his destiny, and Drums Along the Mohawk, adapted from the James Fenimore Cooper nove
l, with Fonda and Claudette Colbert. It was Ford’s first film in color and the only one he made set in the Revolutionary War, with emphasis on “Mother America” and “Birth of a Nation.” Finally, there was Ford’s towering adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which also starred Fonda, this time as Tom Joad in the prototypical leftist Hollywood film prior to America’s entrance into the war, the film that of the three most resembled Stagecoach, the family car replacing the horse-drawn coach, redemption the ultimate goal in both films of those who made the journey, although in Wrath here with far different results. Whereas Stagecoach brings love, peace, and the opportunity for a new life to the Ringo Kid, The Grapes of Wrath turns Tom Joad into a killer and a fugitive.

  Wrath is socially significant because it is the first overtly Depression-era left-wing social/political rebel-as-hero movie to emerge out of prewar Hollywood. It was also the Ford film Wayne disliked most. He had no use for Fonda, whose real-life politics seemed, to Wayne, too close to Tom Joad’s, more One of Them than One of Us.

  For his part, Fonda had little use for Wayne, whom he dismissed as just one more big, dumb actor without a political thought in his head or an ounce of discernible talent: “Duke couldn’t even spell politics . . .” Both were wrong and both were right about each other, and both were, at different times in this period, favorite sons of Ford, which may have added an aspect of cinematic sibling rivalry between the two actors, fueled at least in part by the difference in their acting stylistics: Fonda’s was driven by aggressive narcissism, Wayne’s by soft-spoken stoicism. If Ford leaned toward one over the other, it was Fonda, but it wasn’t much of a tilt. He still liked Wayne as the best projection of himself on-screen, but didn’t think either actor was that good on his own, and if they gave great performances in his films, it was because he brought it out of them.

  Going into his next project with Wayne, The Long Voyage Home, a screenplay by Dudley Nichols who had last worked with Ford on Stagecoach, the director instructed Nichols to keep Duke’s dialogue to a minimum. His acting was better when he had fewer lines. “Count the times Wayne talks,” Ford told another coworker when asked how he got such great performances out of the actor. “That’s the answer. Don’t let him talk unless you have something that needs to be said.” To make The Long Voyage Home, Ford returned to Walter Wanger and his Argosy unit, this time with cinematographer Gregg Toland, who had shot The Grapes of Wrath and whose work on Stagecoach had led Orson Welles to hire Toland to help perfect his deep-focus techniques a year later for Citizen Kane (Toland’s contribution to Ford, Wyler, and Welles reflects some of finest work of each artist’s respective careers).

  Ford’s decision to make Voyage may have had something to do with his desire to back off from the blatant politics of his Fonda-driven trilogy, for fear they might identify him too strongly with the left. According to McBride, “The American leftists during the Popular Front period emphasized patriotic rhetoric as a way of finding common ground with liberals in defense of basic democratic principles. That urgent patriotic groundswell no doubt influenced Ford’s cinematic focus in the trilogy . . . Ford’s heartfelt patriotism was expressed in symbolic, almost pop-art terms in Drums . . . while his militancy on behalf of the Screen Directors Guild helped ease him into publicly supporting more controversial political causes.”

  The Long Voyage Home both expanded and diluted Ford’s political views by updating his good friend, some of the Irish-American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s early one-act plays, which Nichols ingeniously knitted together into a unified story, pulling it into a more relevant political focus by changing the time from World War I to World War II, while pushing it out by changing the locale from America to England, which was officially at war with Germany.62 Most of the action takes place aboard a British merchant ship, the SS Glencairn. The crew are really lost souls, made up of Ford regulars, among them Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond, and John Wayne, here cast against type as a slightly naive Swedish-born sailor, complete with a singsong accent that Wayne struggled to master. Their ship is on an endless journey to nowhere, their spirits suspended in purgatory as punishment for the human failing of the love of war, their final destiny the mythical river Styx. Ford’s use of fog gives the film a German expressionistic look that reveals the influence director F. W. Murnau’s work had on him and that heavily contrasts stylistically with his previous trilogy of überrealistic films.

  Ford brilliantly sets the tone with his opening scene of the men, a crew without a mission, aboard a vessel without a port, on a journey at sea without an end. They long for the native women they have either left, want to be with, or will never have. It is a moment of unfulfilled sexual desire, unattainable peace. It is the hard price of war. The women represent the warmth of life the men leave behind as they journey into coldness. Ford breaks the mood with a deadly German attack on the ship, killing one of the men. Mankind is its own worst enemy, no matter what colors it flaunts.

  Andrew Sarris noted, “The film is suitably moody, shadowy and romantically fatalistic . . . a conscious extension of the foggy expressionism of the Thirties into the programmed heroics of World War II. Producer Walter Wanger, Ford and Nichols were all outspokenly anti-Hitler in this period, and thus The Long Voyage Home constitutes a conscious tribute to Britain in its darkest hour . . . Ford and O’Neill are kindred spirits in that they share a tragic vision of life . . . a uniquely American-Irish Catholic vision in which guilt, repression and submission play a large part.”

  Production on The Long Voyage Home began April 18, 1940, the morning after the night Wayne had finished work on Three Faces West. The film was shot in two months at the Sam Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood and on location at the Port of Wilmington with a budget of $682,000. It proved a disappointment at the box office, a little too esoteric for audiences who that year could more easily identify with Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath.

  Although the film did nothing to advance Wayne’s career, years later in 1949 he told the Saturday Evening Post that it was “[t]he role I liked best [to date] . . . from my point of view, The Long Voyage Home could have been titled Wayne’s Long Struggle with a Swedish Accent, for the role of Oley in this film about the wartime merchant marine . . . Thanks to the coaching of Danish actress Osa Massen and the constructive criticism of director Jack Ford, however, I managed to talk my way out of this hole.”63

  After The Long Voyage Home, Ford, who been in the Naval Reserve in 1934, was assigned to make wartime propaganda films for the government. It may have been a blessing in disguise because he was also a founding member of the MPAC (Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain), an organization that at its peak had fifteen thousand members. In July 1937, the group, including Ford, had hosted Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Florence Eldridge, who made an appearance to raise funds for the Loyalists. Ford donated an ambulance to the cause. In 1938, Ford became vice president, along with Philip Dunne and Miriam Hopkins, of the MPDC (Motion Picture Democratic Committee). Its president was the writer Dashiell Hammett, dedicated to the advancement of liberalism, antifascism, and antiracism. That same year, the first incarnation of HUAC was created in Hollywood, to keep a watchful eye on those who held the reins to the mass medium of film. HUAC’s raison d’être was simple: Hollywood had made a hero out of Gene Autry, and one out of Tom Joad. Washington felt the time had come to keep a closer eye on what was going on in Hollywood, and Ford, who had glorified Tom Joad on-screen. His increasing involvement in the MPDC, a group that HUAC suspected was a Communist-driven anti-Franco organization, increased their interest in him. Ford’s distinguished war service probably saved his Hollywood career.

  Politics affected everyone in Hollywood, in one way or another. Wayne became more active as an officer of the Screen Actors Guild. Here is how Wayne put it later on, to friend and future biographer Maurice Zolotow: “I noticed something was going wrong in this business in 1937, 1938 [one of Wayne’s most fallow periods, before Ford put him into Stageco
ach], the Communists were moving in, and under the guise of being anti-fascist. I saw they were hoaxing a lot of decent men and women on humanitarian grounds. I was on the executive board of the Screen Actors Guild and I noticed one or two of my fellow members whose hearts were always bleeding for the little fellow, but they never really helped him. They just talked about it and tried to stir up dissension between extras and producers and directors . . . at parties Russia was the hope of the world.”

  During the war, Wayne, who did not enlist, made seventeen commercial films. His failure to volunteer for service would become an issue later on in his career and leave a scar on his broad-stroke patriotism.

  THE TOP-GROSSING FILM OF 1940 was Jack Conway’s Boomtown, starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, in the midst of their run of buddy-buddy films. Other big hits that year included George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story starring Jimmy Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant; Walt Disney’s Pinocchio; and Chaplin’s much-anticipated, controversial The Great Dictator, the only studio film that year that dealt overtly with the coming war satirizing Hitler, and a film that got Chaplin in legal trouble with the American government for violating the Neutrality Act, which Washington warned Hollywood to obey. Chaplin owned his own studio and ignored the directive.