by Scott Eyman
By the time the cast and crew were done with the eight weeks of locations in and around Jackson Hole, they had been away from home for nearly four months—Walsh, Evarts, and a few others for a lot longer than that. After the last shot was taken in August, Walsh ordered the company bugler to play “Taps,” and much of the company was dispersed, although a small second unit went up to Montana to shoot the buffalo sequence for two days. For the final sequence, Walsh took Wayne and a small crew to Sequoia National Park to shoot the conclusion, and with that the saga of the making of The Big Trail came to an end.
Wayne emerged from his trial by fire with reservations about Walsh—not as a director, but as a human being. On one of the last days of production, Walsh volunteered to stand in for Wayne in a scene that called for a close-up of Ian Keith getting punched. It was Keith’s last shot of the film, and Walsh told Keith he’d feint with his left but would throw his right. During the take, Walsh feinted with his right and threw his left, sucker punching the actor because of his attentions to Walsh’s wife.
On the train ride back to Hollywood, Wayne was playing cards when somebody came and told him he was needed in an adjacent car to break up a fight. Some of the stuntmen were beating an actor named Frederick Burton half to death.
It seems that Walsh believed that Burton was fooling around with either his wife—it would seem Mrs. Walsh got around—or his mistress. Wayne was fuzzy on which woman was involved, but he remembered Burton’s name, and he also remembered that Walsh had told the stuntmen to take care of his business. Wayne broke up the fight, but he never regained respect for a man who delegated his dirty work.
As the picture went into postproduction, everything seemed to be coming together for its young star. Fox executives forecast a gross of $4 million for The Big Trail, and they believed that John Wayne was going to become another Tom Mix; they lined up two more westerns for him: Wyoming Wonder and No Favors Asked.
The Big Trail opened in Hollywood at Grauman’s Chinese on October 2, 1930. Grauman’s forecourt was turned into a frontier encampment, and the short preceding the feature was a Movietone interview with George Bernard Shaw. In attendance for the premiere was an interesting conglomeration of notables from a variety of studios: Alexander Korda, Henry King, Victor McLaglen, Frank Borzage, Irving Thalberg, Marie Dressler, Louis B. Mayer, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Walter Huston, George Bancroft, Gary Cooper, Buddy Rogers, Lupe Velez, and Nancy Carroll. Also attending were Clyde Morrison, his new wife, and his son the movie star. Wayne’s Sigma Chi fraternity from USC gathered to pay homage to their former brother at the premiere.
Fox flooded papers all over the country with publicity and photographs, and a lot of papers played along: “Sweeping Across 7 States . . . The story of a Love Enduring Untold Hardships . . . Fighting merciless savages . . . Imperiled by stampeded buffalo . . . Driving battered wagon trains across searing deserts . . . Starving . . . Thirsting . . . Lovers Fighting side by side . . . In the most glorious and thrilling adventure you ever witnessed.” Mainly, the thrust of the ads was Manifest Destiny: “Thrills! Adventure! Romance! In 1001 gripping patterns woven from the bone and sinew of the heroic souls who bartered comfort, security and life itself for a share in the vision of the West.”
Some of the ads were devoted to building up the new star, with a dramatic charcoal drawing of the young man and introductory copy: “John Wayne—Acclaimed by critics—hailed by the public.”
Fox also decided to give its new star what might be called backdoor publicity. An article in Motion Picture magazine devoted most of its length to the dreary workaholic nature of young stars, who worked, studied, apprenticed, and lacked the colorful theatrical flourish of silent stars such as John Gilbert.
At the very end of the article, in a postscript, John Wayne brings up the rear as a prop man spotted by Raoul Walsh. “And—in a twinkling—the young man was under contract and was announced as the lead for the picture. Meet Mr. John Wayne, new motion picture celeb!”
Oddly, the ads and publicity didn’t mention Grandeur, because the 70mm equipment was apparently installed only at Grauman’s and New York’s Roxy. Most of the country saw the film in the conventional 35mm version that was advertised as “All Talking Fox . . . The Most Important Picture Ever Produced.”
Many critics rhapsodized: Film Daily said that the “impressive epic of the west has the romance, colorful background, action and thrills for universal appeal . . . John Wayne, as a frontier scout, [scores] big.” “Photography soars to new and unscaled heights in Raoul Walsh’s great epic of the west,” wrote Elizabeth Yeaman in the Hollywood Daily Citizen. “John Wayne, a newcomer to the screen, is most prepossessing in appearance. In his buckskin suit, his long, lean physique presents a picturesque character. He was not an actor when Walsh selected him for this picture and did not become an actor in this picture. As a consequence, his every word and deed is outstanding for its naturalness and naïve force.” The New York Times thought that the movie was as stimulating as John Ford’s The Iron Horse, which it termed “that old silent film classic.” (The Iron Horse was all of six years old at the time.)
Others weren’t so sure about the picture or its star. Sime Silverman in Variety thought that the film “will do a certain business because of its magnitude, but it is not a holdover picture.” Silverman also said that the filmmakers had erred by refusing to cast stars in the picture. “Young Wayne, wholly inexperienced, shows it but also suggests he can be built up.”
Wayne traveled east to do some publicity for the picture dressed in his buckskin costume and holding his rifle. The photographers shot him as he posed in the doorway of his train compartment, holding a rifle in one hand and tipping his white hat in the other (in the film he wears a black hat). Nobody bothered to remind Wayne that he was wearing a wristwatch.
The Big Trail is a film of diametric opposites: awe-inspiring visuals and stilted acting. Wayne, twenty-two years old at the time the film began shooting, is a stunning physical specimen—tall, rangy, extremely handsome. The historian Jane Tompkins was struck by the difference between the Wayne of The Big Trail and the later, leathery Wayne: “The expression of the young John Wayne . . . is tender, and more than a little wistful; it is delicate and incredibly sensitive. Pure and sweet; shy, really and demure.” The difference is that the young man was the authentic Duke Morrison; the older man was the hardened construct called John Wayne.
The young version is sometimes awkward in his line readings, and his reactions are occasionally over the top, as they often were in the first phase of his career. Nevertheless, for a kid who was lugging props a few months before, a kid with aptitude but little training or experience, he’s not bad, and his star quality is fully present.
Most importantly, the film presents Wayne’s screen character in rough sketch form. Despite his youth, Breck Coleman is tough and in charge, with a natural air of command that’s accepted by the other characters. “You fight, that’s life,” he asserts at one point. “You stop fighting, that’s death.” It’s a line that could have been dropped into Red River, The Searchers, The Alamo, or any major Wayne movie from the coming decades. If the western is the foundational myth of America in movie form, then Breck Coleman is the rough, occasionally halting foundation myth of John Wayne.
The young star’s combination of physical strength and grace is already apparent. In his otherwise surly book about Wayne, Garry Wills was amazed by a throwaway shot in which Wayne comes up behind a woman, lifts her by her elbows, flips her around so she’s facing him, and hugs her. “He does not throw her, even slightly, and catch her after turning her; he just handles her as if she were an empty cardboard box, weightless and unresisting.” Wayne’s physical and emotional strength were always matched by an equivalent control and sense of purpose; at the beginning of his career or at its end, he never made a clumsy gesture.
Marguerite Churchill is attractive and professional but not distinguished, and Tyrone Power Sr. gives a roaring performance of pure ham—he ma
kes Wallace Beery look subtle—that seems to have been the model for the Wolf in Disney’s The Three Little Pigs. Ward Bond shows up on the periphery sporting a beard.
A passion for performance was clearly present in Wayne very early, but so was an uneasiness with his choice, the same uneasiness that would be present in the lives of other actors: Barrymore, Flynn, Holden, etc. Perhaps acting was an unsuitable job for a man? Wayne would spend the rest of his life insisting that he wasn’t an actor, he was a reactor, which was really just a backdoor way of asserting his masculinity.
In truth, Wayne instinctively grasped something very close to the modern American concept of acting, which emphasizes behavior over the dialogue-based English tradition. Behavior works for all sorts of parts, but is insufficient when confronted with, say, Shakespeare, which has to be spoken. But Wayne’s characters would always be defined as much by movement and attitude as by words.
Raoul Walsh’s shots are much more carefully composed than most of his work; the dimensions of the 70mm frame mandate a lot of extras and background action, and the lenses don’t let Walsh get any closer than a chest close-up. The lack of intimacy is compensated for by the majestic long shots. Generally, Walsh frames his shots so as to leave a third to a half of the frame open to landscape or background action.
Walsh’s images made The Big Trail an authentic epic, but they weren’t able to prevent it from being an authentic epic flop. It ran for eight weeks at the Chinese Theatre—a good run—but only two weeks at the Roxy. More importantly, The Big Trail underperformed in conventional 35mm showings in the rest of the country. Theater chains, having just expensively retooled for sound, weren’t interested in expensively retooling yet again. Absent any widespread public demand for 70mm, it was easier to just let it wither away.
Unfortunately, the 35mm version of the film didn’t fully show off the film’s primary virtues—its physical re-creation of the pioneer experience. The mini-widescreen boom of 1929–1930 died quickly, and went underground until revived in the early 1950s as a means of luring audiences back to the movies after the erosion wrought by television. (More people have seen the widescreen version of The Big Trail since its rediscovery in 1986 than ever saw it in 1930.)
Winterset, Iowa, finally got to see the movie in January 1931. The Madisonian featured the story with the headline: “John Wayne, a Winterset Boy, in Talkies at the Iowa.” The story continued, “John Wayne is the stage name of Marion Michael Morrison, as he was known to all his friends.”
With a negative cost of $1.7 million, The Big Trail amassed only $945,000 in domestic rentals, another $242,000 in foreign rentals. The foreign language versions added $200,234 to the budget, and returned a tiny profit of $9,264. When the accountants had completed their grim task, it was clear that The Big Trail was a financial bloodbath—the loss topped $1 million.
As the film scholar William K. Everson noted, it’s strange that Fox hadn’t handed The Big Trail to John Ford, who had already demonstrated great expertise with westerns; it might not have been a better picture, but it assuredly would have been better organized, hence less expensive, hence more commercial. The failure of The Big Trail affected Raoul Walsh’s career to the extent that Fox never again gave him that kind of budget. But the bulk of the movie’s failure fell on its young star. The Big Trail was the last A picture John Wayne would make for nearly ten years, as Fox quickly canceled his prospective starring vehicles.
Wayne next showed up in a Fox programmer called Girls Demand Excitement, directed by the choreographer Seymour Felix, which began shooting in November 1930 after the failure of The Big Trail was apparent. Wayne’s co-star was Virginia Cherrill, the leading lady of Chaplin’s City Lights.
Wayne always regarded Girls Demand Excitement as the nadir of his professional life. “I was the fellow who was sour grapes, who played basketball to try to get the girls out of school. Well, I want to tell you something, I never tried to get a girl out of school in my life. I’d want them right there. . . . [Felix] had girls and boys sitting in trees and sticking their heads out of class windows and hugging each other. It was just so goddamn ridiculous that I was hanging my head.”
Actually, Girls Demand Excitement, while innocuous, is not really as bad as Wayne thought; as Richard Roberts noted, had it been made a year earlier, or two years later, it would have made a good musical in the vein of Good News. Wayne plays a gardener who works for the family of the charisma-free Cherrill, a spoiled rich girl. In college, she and Wayne find themselves in a fraternity/sorority war. Wayne’s performance is relaxed and without mannerisms.
Variety noted that “John Wayne is the same young man who was in The Big Trail and also is here spotted in a farce that does little to set him off.” Wayne’s next appearance for Fox came in May 1931, when he showed up in a small part in something called Three Girls Lost.
Wayne was slinking around Fox, embarrassed about the failure of The Big Trail, utterly demoralized by Girls Demand Excitement, when he ran into Will Rogers, the biggest star on the lot. Rogers saw that Wayne was down and asked what the trouble was. Wayne explained his situation, and the sensible Rogers told him, “You’re working, aren’t you? Just keep working.”
Wayne always remembered that moment as “the best advice I ever got—just keep working and learning, however bad the picture . . . and boy, I made some lousy pictures.” For the rest of his life Wayne always put more stock in being a working actor than in biding his time waiting for just the right part in just the right movie.
Three Girls Lost completed filming in mid-January of 1931, at which point Fox released the young actor. That made it official: John Wayne had been a white-hot new star at twenty-two, and he was washed up at twenty-three.
His time in the wilderness was just beginning, but that time would give him an image, a personality, and a technique. That time would prove his salvation.
* * *
1. That August, the trade papers added up Fox’s indebtedness and figured out that the company had $45 million in debt payments due within the next six months, not counting $7 million in creditor judgments. Receivership, not prosperity, was just around the corner.
CHAPTER FOUR
After Fox dumped him, Wayne landed a six-month contract at Columbia. Men Are Like That, his first picture for the studio, was an adaptation of the Augustus Thomas play Arizona, which sounds like a western but isn’t. Wayne’s co-star was Laura La Plante, a charming leading lady of silent pictures who was equally charming in talkies. The script was by Robert Riskin, soon to start working with Frank Capra, the director the capable George B. Seitz.
Wayne plays a young football star/officer who loves the ladies then leaves them. The jilted La Plante marries Wayne’s commanding officer, whereupon Wayne starts up with La Plante’s sister. There are all sorts of racy possibilities, few of which are realized.
It’s a mediocre movie, but it captures Wayne in the chrysalis stage of his career, without an outdoor background to accommodate his rough performance. The mannerisms that would become familiar—the wrinkling of the forehead, the pauses in the middle of his lines—are absent, although he does clench his jaw to indicate anger. His inexperience is mainly demonstrated by the fact that he doesn’t really listen to the other actors, just waits for his cue.
The critics were harsher than they needed to be—the stink of The Big Trail was all over Wayne, and the dogs barked their condescension for a decade and more. The New York Times said that “[It is] hardly a film that can be characterized as good entertainment. . . . Miss La Plante is not convincing any more than John Wayne is in the part of Denton.”
Columbia boss Harry Cohn must have been unimpressed, because for the rest of the contract Wayne was given roles that were little more than insults—a corpse in The Deceiver, billing beneath Buck Jones and Tim McCoy in a couple of westerns. Complicating Wayne’s stay at Columbia was Cohn’s belief that Wayne was having an affair with a young actress whom Cohn regarded as his personal property.
“It was a g
oddamned lie,” Wayne told me, still furious more than forty years later. “I’d been brought up to respect older people, and he talked to me like I was a sewer rat.” At one point, Cohn screamed at Wayne, “You keep your goddamned fly buttoned at my studio!” Wayne reacted to the unjust accusation with a lifelong slow burn. Cohn began a process of harassment calculated to provoke Wayne to break his contract—unless he was scheduled to work on a given day, he was barred from the studio.
But the cowboy star Buck Jones decided to use Wayne in spite of Cohn. Jones would invite the younger man to go boating around Catalina whenever Jones was on the outs with his wife. Jones and Wayne had something in common—they had both worked for John Ford. Wayne never forgot the gesture that came at a time when he was increasingly desperate and thinking about trying boxing, because the movie business just seemed too tough. Buck Jones spent the rest of his life in B westerns, and Wayne always remembered him with affection: “Buck Jones was one of the real heroes of our business. He went back into that [Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in] Boston three times after people and the fourth time he didn’t come back out. But there’s no memorial to him, there’s no thought [for him]. Ours is the business of what did you do for me today . . . they certainly forgot old Buck.”
Within a single year, Fox had washed its hands of Wayne and he was let go at Columbia. If he wanted to keep working, if he wanted to maintain any standing at all in the eyes of Josie’s parents, he had little choice except to become one of the all-purpose jobbing actors haunting Poverty Row, the area around Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Toward the end of 1931, Wayne signed to do three serials for Mascot, a small company run by a man named Nat Levine.