Monday, November 27, 2017
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
12 Best John Wayne Movies List
1.) The Searchers (1956)
An American Civil War veteran embarks on a journey to rescue his niece from the Comanches.
2.) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
A senator, who became famous for killing a notorious outlaw, returns for the funeral of an old friend and tells the truth about his deed.
3.) Rio Bravo (1959)
A small-town sheriff in the American West enlists the help of a cripple, a drunk, and a young gunfighter in his efforts to hold in jail the brother of the local bad guy.
Cast: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson
Director: Howard Hawks
Director: Howard Hawks
4.) The Longest Day (1962)
The events of D-Day, told on a grand scale from both the Allied and German points of view.
Cast: John Wayne, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda
Director: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton
Director: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton
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5.) True Grit (1959)
A drunken, hard-nosed U.S. Marshal and a Texas Ranger help a stubborn teenager track down her father's murderer in Indian territory.
Cast: John Wayne, Kim Darby
Director: Henry Hathaway
Director: Henry Hathaway
6.) Stagecoach (1939)
A group of people traveling on a stagecoach find their journey complicated by the threat of Geronimo and learn something about each other in the process.
Cast: John Wayne, Claire Trevor
Director: John Ford
Director: John Ford
7.) The Quiet Man (1952)
A retired American boxer returns to the village of his birth in Ireland, where he finds love.
Cast: John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara
Director: John Ford
Director: John Ford
8.) Red River (1948)
Dunson leads a cattle drive, the culmination of over 14 years of work, to its destination in Missouri. But his tyrannical behavior along the way causes a mutiny, led by his adopted son.
Cast: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru
Director: Howard Hawks
Director: Howard Hawks
9.) El Dorado (1967)
Cole Thornton, a gunfighter for hire, joins forces with an old friend, Sheriff J.P. Hara. Together with an old Indian fighter and a gambler, they help a rancher and his family fight a rival rancher that is trying to steal their water.
Cast: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan
Director: Howard Hawks
Director: Howard Hawks
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10.) The Shootist (1976)
A dying gunfighter spends his last days looking for a way to die with a minimum of pain and a maximum of dignity.
Cast: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart
Director: Don Siegel
Director: Don Siegel
11.) How The West Was Won (1962)
A family saga covering several decades of Westward expansion in the nineteenth century - including the Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the building of the railroads.
Cast: John Wayne, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda
Director: John Ford
Director: John Ford
12.) Fort Apache (1948)
At Fort Apache, an honorable and veteran war captain finds conflict when his regime is placed under the command of a young, glory hungry lieutenant colonel with no respect for the local Indian tribe.
Cast: John Wayne, Heny Fonda, Shirley Temple
Director: John Ford
Director: John Ford
Thursday, October 26, 2017
13 Surprising Facts About John Wayne That Reveal His True Character
From The Searchers to Rio Bravo to True Grit, John Wayne never failed to astound us with his acting. His strong personality and renowned generosity were said to have been some of his greatest characteristics- both on and off the screen. But, there are quite a few facts about America’s favorite cowboy that you might not have known. Read on for 13 surprising facts about John Wayne.
1) Winston Churchill
Wayne looked up to Winston Churchill and owned many of his writings.
2) He Was Very Superstitious
Wayne hated hats on left on beds or salt passed directly to him at the table, for instance.
3) Nickname
He got his nickname of Duke from the family dog growing up. His real name was Marion Morrison.
4) Surfing Got Him Into Acting
If Wayne hadn’t been injured in a surfing accident in the 1920s it is likely that he wouldn’t have become an actor. The shoulder injury he sustained while surfing meant that he lost his football scholarship in college and had to take a job to make ends meet- as a prop boy at Fox Studios where he was soon put in front of the camera instead of behind it.
Via/ Wiki Commons
5) There Was a Price on His Head
Joseph Stalin supposedly ordered a hit on Wayne after anti-Communist views made by the All-American star had enraged the Russian leader. There were several attempts made on his life, each of which were quelled by Wayne and his stuntmen.
6) He Copied a Stuntman
Wayne took some of his most well-known mannerisms from a cowboy stuntman named Yakima Canutt. The lowered voice and slowed speech are aspects that he observed in Canutt and then copied on screen.
7) He was Balding
And he was apparently unashamed of it- many home movies and photos exist of him in a natural state, but for public appearances and films he wore a toupée starting in about 1948. Often in transit he would wear a hat to hide the fact that he was going bald on the chance that he might be photographed by newspapers. His many cowboy and soldier films meant that he was very often wearing a hat on screen, too. Interviews with photographers who knew him and his (lack of) hair confirm this as well.
8) The Big C
Wayne coined the term the “big c” to reference cancer after his 1964 diagnosis of lung cancer. It wasn’t until 1979 that stomach cancer finally took his life.
Via/ Wiki Commons
9) He Was Good Friends With Lucy
Wayne was close friends with Lucille Ball and probably met her through his affair with Maureen O’hara (who was once roommate to Ball). Wayne made appearances on I Love Lucy and on The Lucy Show.
10) Places Named After Him
Among the places named for him are an airport, an elementary school, a highway, and a hiking trail.
Architectural model for the new terminal at the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA. Via/ Flickr
11) Heart Surgery
Wayne had heart surgery to replace one of his valves with that of a pig’s heart in 1978.
12) Design Skills
Wayne was rumored to have been quite good at decorating and if he had anything to do with designing these rooms then we’d have to agree. He is said to have acquired these skills from his days as a prop boy.
13) He Was a Fool for His Favorite Candy
Tootsie Rolls were the Duke’s preferred treat. In his last days he lamented not being able to have any.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
The Woes of John Wayne
This is an abridged version of an article that appeared in the in the October 27, 1962, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. You can read the complete original article in the flipbook, below.
This article and other features about the stars of Tinseltown can be found in the Post’s Special Collector’s Edition, The Golden Age of Hollywood. This edition can be ordered here.
John (Duke) Wayne had just come back from his annual checkup at the Scripps Clinic in Southern California. Considering his age and, as he put it, “the pounding you have to take in this business,” the world’s number-one box-office movie star was in passable shape.
The eyes that once glared hate for a movie critic who wrote of his pictures, “It never Waynes but it bores,” still had the chilly blue glint through their slitted lids. The face that has stonily ignored more enemy six guns than Wyatt Earp was red-blotched from the sun. Although the once handsome head of hair has receded so far that Wayne now must use a partial toupee on-screen, his deeply furrowed brow, forever linked with bloody wars, fires, floods, fist fights, doomed planes and countless other celluloid crises, still suggested unflinching pluck.
As he talked, frequently cussing and using the same grim drawl that has cowed badmen from Fort Dodge to Tombstone, he compulsively lighted one cigarette after another. “So maybe it’s six months off the end of my life,” he said, opening the day’s fifth pack, “but they’re not going to kill me.”
Although he may not be worried about his health, his twilight years — he is 55 now — are turning up other hazards. At an age when most big-money actors, tired of the grind, are managing motels and oil wells bought for them by farsighted managers, John Wayne is still tenaciously playing heroic leads in action pictures because he desperately needs the money.
Such singleness of purpose, while limiting artistic achievement and ruling out such honors as Academy Awards for acting, has given Wayne a sort of immortality. He has been paid as much as $666,000 a picture, and his 161 films have grossed about $350,000,000, a record that Hollywood historians expect to stand for all time. “Most films are money in the bank,” one associate says, “when you’ve got good ol’ Duke in there banging away.”
But if Duke does well for others, he has trouble doing well for himself. The recent deaths of three close friends have sapped him, and despite the small fortune he has made, Wayne today is just barely breaking even. His distress extends to the world at large, which he considers to be run by a band of fuzzy minds who probably would have sneaked out a back archway at the Alamo.
Possibly to dispel the gloom brought on by those thoughts, Wayne absorbs a formidable amount of alcohol without getting drunk. In every angry moment he risks a flare — up from the ulcers that plagued him in earlier days, and he is so sensitive about the printed word that he now insists — though it did not apply to this article—on approving every line written about him before granting an interview.
A Rough Reputation
One time, Frank Sinatra had hired screenwriter Albert Maltz, one of the “unfriendly 10,” who served jail sentences for contempt of the J. Parnell Thomas House Un-American Activities Committee, and reporters called Wayne for an opinion. Wayne snapped, “I don’t think my opinion is too important. Why don’t you ask Sinatra’s crony, who’s going to run our country for the next few years, what he thinks of it?”
Wayne’s dig at President Kennedy appeared in print and generated so much heat that Sinatra was forced to fire Maltz. Shortly afterward at a Hollywood benefit show, Sinatra stalked off the stage when Wayne came up to the microphone.
“Frankie,” Wayne said to Sinatra later, “What the hell did you walk away from me for?”
“Well, you cried,” Sinatra said. “You blasted off your mouth.”
“You mean the Maltz thing?”
“Yes,” Sinatra replied.
“You want to talk about it?” Wayne asked him in reply.
“Some other time,” said Sinatra. “Duke, we’re friends, and we’ll probably do pictures together. Let’s forget the whole thing.”
This is typical of Wayne. Although he sits on the far right, he has many friends among Hollywood liberals. When Robert Ryan’s wife and children received a bomb threat last year, because Ryan had read part of Robert Welsh’s John Birch Society “Blue Book” on a Los Angeles radio station, Ryan and Wayne were in France, working on the Longest Day. Wayne was the first to offer help. He wanted to rush home and help Ryan find the would-be bombers and beat them to a pulp.
In recent years, Wayne has indeed had many things on his mind, most of them calculated to bring on insomnia. Although he shouldn’t have to worry about being overdrawn at the bank, Wayne claims his millions have mysteriously slipped away in the night.
“I suddenly found out after 25 years,” he said sadly, “that I was starting out all over again. I just didn’t have it made at all. Until last year I had a business manager who didn’t do anything illegal, but we were involved in many unfortunate money-losing deals. I would just about break even if I sold everything right now.”
ORIGINAL JOHN WAYNE T-SHIRT | WORDS OF LEGEND
Wayne says he invested $1,200,000 of his own money — all the cash he could scrape up — in producing the ill-fated Alamo. Friends, including Texas millionaire Clint Murchison, also invested huge sums of money. Wayne is confident they won’t wind up losers, but the picture must gross $18,000,000 before there is a profit, and Wayne’s chances of getting all his money back are about the same as falling an inside straight.
Despite it all, Wayne continues to live well. His home is a five-acre estate in Encino, where the hot San Fernando Valley sun warms an Olympic-size swimming pool and vast reaches of green grass. An electric eye controls the gate into the long, curving driveway to the big ranch-style house. Inside, Wayne and his third wife, former Peruvian actress Pilar Palette, are waited on by three servants, also from Peru.
To keep up all the payments, Wayne works in picture after picture. Recently he has been making them at a rate of three a year. In the past 12 months he has appeared in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Hatari, and The Longest Day. He has just finished Donovan’s Reef for Paramount, and he will make three more pictures in 1963. He has also joined the cast of The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Wayne’s frenetic filmmaking may eventually cure his money ills, but his deeper woes defy remedy. Gone are three of his closest friends: actor Grant Withers, who committed suicide; actor Ward Bond, who dropped dead of a heart attack in 1960 at the height of his TV fame in Wagon Train; and Bev Barnett, Wayne’s longtime press agent. “Oh, God,” Wayne said of Barnett’s death, “that’s a tough one.”
The deaths of these close friends, the near death of his 74-year-old mother, Mrs. Sydney Preen of Long Beach, in an auto accident, and two wrenching divorces have drained some of the violence out of Wayne. In the early days of his career Wayne’s muscular figure (six feet four, 220 pounds) was a challenge to folks who thought they could lick him. “I found out once,” he says, “that some of the toughest men I knew, when they really get mad, have a little smile and a look and they’re talking low. This is the way I get mad. But it happens very seldom anymore. I really like people. Unless people go out of their way to insult me, they’re going to have a hard time having any trouble with me. My last street fight was with a couple of boilermakers, but that was years ago.”
Some subjects still trigger a flare-up. One is politics. Television is another. “Television,” Wayne says, “has a tendency to reach a little. In their westerns they’re getting away from the fact that those men were fighting the elements and the rawness of nature, and didn’t have time for this couch work. For me, basic art and simplicity are most important. Love. Hate. Everything right out there without much nuance.”
source ==> http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/09/25/culture/movies/woes-john-wayne.html
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
10 Awesome Things You Should Know About John Wayne
10Stalin Ordered His Death
Joseph Stalin was quite the film buff and found himself outraged at the anti-communist sentiments Wayne expressed in the late 1940s. Reportedly, he ordered a hit on the movie star, dispatching two KGB assassins in 1951. But the FBI were wise to the plot and intercepted the two hit men. The agency also allegedly foiled other plots to kill Wayne, including a sniper attack when he visited Vietnam in 1966.
As evidence that Stalin was responsible, we have, first, the word of an unnamed Soviet source. But we also have the word of Stalin’s successor, Premier Nikita Khrushchev. When Khrushchev met John Wayne in 1958, he apologized for the incident, telling him, “That was the decision of Stalin in his last mad years. I rescinded the order.”
Read more fascinating stories about John Wayne’s incredible life in the official biography John Wayne: The Life and Legend at Amazon.com!
9Cancer
Photo via Stanford School of Medicine
Wayne’s greatest film successes came as a Wild West lawman. His most inappropriately cast role, on the other hand, was surely the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan in the 1956 film The Conqueror. The movie was excruciatingly unwatchable on its own, and its ugly legacy makes it even worse.
Much of the film was shot on location in Utah, downwind of Nevada’s nuclear test sites. In the years that followed, nearly half of the people on set were diagnosed with cancer, including two of Wayne’s own sons. John himself battled cancer in his later years (he coined the term “The Big C”). In 1964, pulmonary cancer cost him four ribs and his entire left lung. He died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979, aged 72.
Wayne dismissed the “Curse of The Conqueror.” He believed his cancer was a consequence of smoking. This makes perfect sense; he had a six-packs-a day-habit.
In 1985, Wayne’s estate allowed the use of his name for the John Wayne Cancer Foundation, which advocates various programs to fight the disease.
8Marion And The Duke
Photo credit: Fox Film Corporation
John was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907. His parents had a strange affinity for the name “Robert,” and they decided to squirrel it away for the next child, so Marion’s middle name was changed to Michael.
When Marion roamed the neighborhood, he never went anywhere without his Airedale terrier Duke at his side. The two were such constant companions that local firefighters began calling the boy “Little Duke.” The nickname stuck for life. He certainly preferred it to the feminine “Marion.” (Another famous Marion who hides behind a nickname is Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight).
When the man began working in film, studio bigwigs were no more impressed with his name than he was. He appeared as “Duke Morrison” in 1929’s Words and Music, and in 1930, director Raoul Walsh and Fox Studios executive Winfield Sheehan started billing him as “John Wayne.” The young actor had no say in the matter, and he was largely ambivalent about the name. He preferred to go by “Duke” with those in his inner circle.
7Football Career
Photo credit: John Wayne Enterprises
John Wayne stood at 193 centimeters (6’4″). That’s tall today, and for a man born over 100 years ago, it was massive. Young Marion easily scored a football scholarship to the University of Southern California, playing as an offensive tackle. Then, as now, college athletes weren’t paid, and Coach Howard Jones found him a job working for Fox Studios as a laborer and prop man.
While out body surfing with a friend on Balboa Beach just before the start of his junior year, Marion got caught up in a huge wave and smashed against the sand, badly injuring his shoulder. He tried to continue football, but he was too hurt to play well. Coach Jones moved him down on the roster and denied him his meals. Hungry and strapped for cash, the young man quit football and devoted all his time to Fox Studios.
6Draft Dodging
Many of John Wayne’s major roles showed him as a war hero, but he never actually served in the military. Born in 1907, he was too young to participate in World War I. By the time the US entered World War II, he was 34 years old and just beginning to become famous.
He also had health issues, including a bad back (from performing his own stunts), chronic ear infections, and the torn shoulder muscle that derailed his football career. Had he actually undergone a physical, he might have been classified as 4-F, or unacceptable for military service. Instead, his studio successfully applied for him to receive a 3-A deferment (“hardship to dependents”) because he had a family.
Given his fame, Wayne would likely have been granted a ceremonial role if he had enlisted. Yet he likely he did more for the war effort by appearing in films that glamorized the military. He also applied to work for the OSS during the war, and he spent months doing USO appearances for the troops.
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5Chess
Photo credit: Paramount Pictures
One of Wayne’s favorite pastimes was playing chess. He was a skilled player but was not beyond using duplicitous means if he could get away with it.
While shooting 1970’s Chisum, he became friendly with Christopher Mitchum, the son of Hollywood legend Robert Mitchum. John invited Christopher to play chess, and the young man was flabbergasted to find Wayne was cheating, moving two pieces simultaneously while using his big hands to block Chris’s view.
At first, Christopher didn’t know what to do, and he complained to veteran actor Ed Faulkner, who’d worked with Wayne on several projects. Ed advised Christopher to call John out on it.
The next game, John was up to his old tricks, and Christopher told him, “Excuse me, Duke, but you’re cheating.” Wayne was unperturbed, responding, “Well, I was wondering when you were going to say something. Set ’em up. We’ll play again.”
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4Wayne’s Boxer Relative
Photo credit: Túrelio/Wikimedia
American boxer Tommy Morrison briefly held the WBO and ICB heavyweight championship titles. He portrayed mulleted Tommy “The Machine” Gunn, the main antagonist, in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky V. He also happened to be John Wayne’s grandnephew, and he went by the nickname “The Duke.”
While Morrison had some success in the ring, he seemed almost doomed from the start. His father was an abusive alcoholic, and his mother had gone on trial for murder. His older brother Tim did 15 years in prison on a rape conviction. In 1996, Morrison announced that he’d contracted HIV due to a “permissive, fast, and reckless lifestyle.”
In the years that followed, he dropped out of boxing and had frequent brushes with the law. He also went through a survivalist phase in which he slept in a cave, convinced the world would soon end. In 2006, he emerged to say that the original HIV tests had actually been false positives, and he was free of the disease. He tested negative in 2007, likely due to tampering with blood samples. In 2011, Quebec required him to take a supervised blood test if he wanted to box in the province, and he refused.
Morrison in fact still had HIV, and he did very little to fight his infection. HIV-positive Magic Johnson reached out to him, but he didn’t respond. He only spent a month taking the AZT antiviral drug. Morrison withered away and died of AIDS-related complications in 2013 at age 44 after spending over a year bedridden.
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3Yakima Canutt
John Wayne would seem the last person to adopt the typical Hollywood affectation over appearance. You would have never seen him at the plastic surgeon trying to preserve his youth with Botox. But after his hair began thinning in the 1940s, he did begin wearing a wig for movies and certain public appearances, probably at the request of the studio. Yet he made no secret that he was bald; when hanging out with family and friends, he would always go au naturel, and he was not shy about being filmed or photographed without his hairpiece.
In 1974, he appeared at Harvard University, where he unflinchingly stood up to a fusillade of questioning from the student body. Though pushing 70, he had a ball with the kids. One student asked, “Where did you get that phony toupee?” He replied, “It’s not phony. It’s real hair. Of course, it’s not mine, but it’s real.”
1Red Meat
Photo credit: RKO Radio Pictures
Perhaps the most laughably disturbing rumor about John Wayne was that, upon his death, an autopsy found several pounds (40, say some sources) of undigested red meat lodged in his digestive tract.
The story checks all the boxes of a tantalizing urban legend—a famous personality, death, dietary excess, bowel movements (or lack thereof). However, it can be immediately dismissed without even considering the biological impossibilities. John Wayne was 72 years old when he died and had been ravaged by cancer for a long time. There was little doubt that he’d succumbed to natural causes, so he didn’t receive an autopsy.
Unfortunately, this story could be applied to Elvis Presley, who died at the young age of 42. Elvis had a congenital twist in his colon and a history of drug and laxative abuse. When he died, he had a great deal of chalky feces lodged in his colon.
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source ==> https://listverse.com/2014/06/19/10-awesome-things-you-should-know-about-john-wayne/
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