Unnuanced Pleasure

I thoroughly agree with Charles Taylor:

”John Wayne represents more force, more power than anyone else on the screen,” his frequent director Howard Hawks once said. A performer who wields that kind of force, and has a physical presence to match, does not provide nuanced pleasure. But only the crudest reading would reduce the overwhelming force of Wayne’s persona to gung-ho cheerleading for American right and American might. To be true to the contradictions and moral ambiguities of Wayne’s best performances—Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, True Grit, El Dorado—you’d have to say he stands not so much for American power as for the American experiment—and thus for the possibility that it could all go wrong.

Although I would subtract True Grit and El Dorado from the list of Wayne's best films and add She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (all films directed by John Ford, about whom the same thing could be said vis-a-vis "contradictions and moral ambiguities" that Taylor says of Wayne), as well as Rio Bravo, which is the focus of Taylor's essay.

Comments

[Andrew]

If such as Wayne's physical power and inner certainty are well directed intellectually, truthfully- all is well. If mis-directed such faith in things like patriotism is very dangerous indeed. And not being intellectually of any real depth, it has very little inner self-defence against being mis-led. The patriotic nonsense of Yellow Ribbon, for example.