[May 1st marks the 80th anniversary of Citizen Kane’s release. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for Kane and other classic films, and I’d love your thoughts on them all and other films you’d AmericanStudy!]
On two Hollywood
lives and legacies, and a film that purposefully complicates both of them.
John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, both of
whom spent many years in and connected to the Boy Scouts, had remarkably
parallel childhoods and young adulthoods in many other ways as well. Wayne (his
birth name was Marion Morrison) was born in a small Iowa town to parents of
mostly Scots-Irish heritage, raised Presbyterian, played football and
participated in debate and journalism in high school (his family had moved to
Glendale, California by that time), and wanted to attend the US Naval Academy
but ended up pre-law at the University of Southern California instead. Stewart
was born in a small Pennsylvania town to parents of mostly Scottish heritage,
raised Presbyterian, played football and edited the yearbook in high school,
and nearly attended the Naval Academy but ended up an architecture major at
Princeton University instead. Both men likewise began acting in a serious way
while still very young, with Wayne appearing in his first film at the age of
19 (after losing his football scholarship and having to leave USC) and Stewart
joining the prominent Cape Cod theater group the
University Players while he was still in college.
Perhaps the only
significant biographical divergence between Wayne and Stewart occurred during
World War II: while it seems that Wayne
wanted to serve in some military capacity, he did not do so, touring the
South Pacific with the USO but otherwise continuing to make films (many of them
about
the war); Stewart, on the other hand, flew numerous combat
missions for the Air Force between 1942 and 1945,
putting his burgeoning Hollywood career entirely on hold for the duration of
the war. While each of those military histories is of course individual and
complicated, there’s also at least a bit of an irony in comparing them to the
two men’s subsequent film careers and overall Hollywood legacies: Wayne became
more and more associated with themes like war, violence, and an idealized
form of uber-masculinity, a narrative
that still endures to this day; while Stewart became connected to more
thoughtful and sensitive alternative
images of masculinity and movie stardom, perhaps especially due to the
first film he made upon resuming
his career post-war, It’s a Wonderful
Life (1946). While of course life and art almost always diverge, it’s
fair to say that in this case both men’s artistic legacies have often been
linked directly to perceived aspects of their personal lives and identities,
links that their respective wartime experiences at least render more ambiguous
and uncertain.
The one film
that the two men starred in together, John
Ford’s classic 1962 Western The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, interestingly and importantly
investigates many of these precise questions and themes. In some ways, Valance relies upon the two men’s
stereotypical images: Stewart plays a lawyer and politician whose intellectual
identity seems challenged (but whose career has been enhanced) by a famous duel
in which he apparently shot and killed a notorious outlaw; while Wayne plays a
rough and tumble rancher who was the outlaw’s actual killer and has stoically
kept that fact quiet to benefit his friend. Yet on a deeper level, Ford’s film
offers a direct challenge to both the Western genre (one in which Ford and his
frequent collaborator Wayne worked so often) and the idea that we can trust
mythic narratives of identity at all. The film’s most famous line—and one of
the more famous in Hollywood history—comes near the end, when a newspaper reporter
learns the truth about the shooting but decides not to reveal it to anyone; as
explanation he says to Stewart’s character, “This is the West, sir. When
the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It’s a great line, but an incredibly
complicated one, and I don’t believe we’re necessarily meant to accept it as
the right perspective—or at the very least, it asks us to investigate legends
and consider what facts and truths might lie untold beneath those mythic
stories. A question that certainly applies to the lives and legacies of both
John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.
Last
FilmStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on this or other classic films?
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