Like Musselman I grew up with John Wayne films, although, in my case, it was through television. I remember many a Saturday night huddled with my two brothers around the TV set anticipating a nail-biting gunfight between John Wayne and some good-for-nothing bad guy. Whether it was as the one-eyed drunken Marshall Rooster Cogburn in True Grit or as the single-minded Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, it was always exciting.
The tumbleweed and cactus backgrounds were seared in my memory, so even though this is my first time in Utah, the quintessentially Western landscape here makes me feel as though I already know the place.
John Wayne was an unlikely character to become such a massive screen legend. Born in 1907 in Winterset, Iowa, a small Midwest town, his given name was Marion Michael Morrison. Never happy with the name, he adopted the nickname ‘Duke’ – the name of his giant Airedale Terrier dog – and when studio bosses decided Marion wasn’t the right handle for a rough and ready silver screen cowpoke, John Wayne was bestowed upon him.
Arguably, he would never have been the star he was without the director John Ford. It was Ford who went against the wishes of his producers and cast John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in 1939’s Stagecoach, a seminal work that not only catapulted a relatively unknown B-movie actor to A-list celebrity status but also elevated Westerns from simplistic, cheaply made Saturday afternoon matinee fodder to a serious adult genre with complex storylines.
And, though Ford was already an Oscar-winning director for his 1935 movie The Informer, it was Stagecoach that made him one of three enduring icons to come out of the film. The others being John Wayne and the film’s location: Monument Valley, a 12,000-hectare patch of blood red earth and towering Navajo Sandstone buttes and mesas.
It is scenery everyone who has ever watched Western films knows, even if they couldn’t point it out on a map. Some argue that it is now so ubiquitous and hackneyed as to be nothing more than a cliché. Perhaps, but standing on Lookout Point at dawn just as the sun begins to brighten the sky behind the three most famous of Monument Valley’s red towers – Left and Right Mitten and Merrick Butte – it is anything but cliché.
Thank you for your article on the Old West and how John Wayne is remembered here. I am from Utah and grew up wishing I was the character that John Wayne was portraying. In fact, that is one of the reasons I wrote my book. I believe that America was made by people just like John Wayne portrayed. Men who stuck to the values they were taught. Even when someone tried to take their dream away. They were the quiet ones that got things done. Thank you. B L Strong, author strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheDreamTheMan