Would Frank Sinatra rank with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z as America's favorite musical artist? That'll be the day.
The Duke, as historian Garry Wills observed, "reverses the law of optics." The farther away this hombre gets, the larger he looms. I'm talking not only about Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, conceived as a corrective to the gung-ho heroics of a Wayne war movie. Or about this week's celebration of Wayne on Turner Classic Movies. Or about the restored Rio Bravo showing at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday. Or about the stat that in the history of Movies Unlimited, John Wayne has sold more units than any other actor.
I'm talking about this: When a Marine in Iraq shoots first and asks questions later, they say he "pulled a John Wayne." When we think of masculinity, The Duke is the yardstick by which we measure it. When we think of those who are larger than life, Wayne is the authoritarian who commands respect or incites rebellion. In my case, both.
Rather than doff my Stetson on the occasion of The Duke's hundredth (Saturday), I want to sort through my ambivalence about the man reviled by some as the Godzilla of American imperialism and revered by even more as a god of the American Olympus.
The stormy relationship that some have with their fathers is one that I have with Wayne. For as long as I can remember I've responded very differently to his two faces. The unyielding man of war in Sands of Iwo Jima makes me want to go AWOL. The unyielding man of the West who yields in the final moments of Red River by not killing his sworn enemy makes me weep, tapping a reservoir of emotion I didn't know I possessed.
In my moviegoing life, Wayne is responsible for more cinematic epiphanies than I can count. Is it great acting? He called it reacting. I'd call it presence.
