One of the few Hollywood films to deal with actual combat operations in the Civil War, The Horse Soldiers (1959) is based on Harold Sinclair’s novel, and a first rate novel it is I might add, The Horse Soldiers (1956), a fictionalized account of Grierson’s raid in 1863.
Perhaps the most daring and successful Union cavalry raid of the war, Brigadier General Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher who, after being bitten by a horse at a young age, hated horses, led 1700 Illinois and Iowa troopers through 600 miles of Confederate territory from southern Tennessee to the Union held Baton Rouge. Grierson and his men ripped up railroads, burned Confederate supplies and tied down many times their number of Confederate troops and succeeded in giving Grant a valuable diversion as he began his movement against Vicksburg.
John Wayne gives a fine, if surly, performance as Colonel Marlowe, the leader of the Union cavalry brigade. William Holden as a Union surgeon serves as a foil for Wayne. Constance Towers, as a captured Southern belle, supplies the obligatory Hollywood love interest.
Overall the film isn’t a bad treatment of the raid, and the period. I especially appreciated two scenes. John Wayne refers to his pre-war activities as “Before this present insanity” and Constance Towers gives an impassioned speech in which she refers to the Union soldiers as thieves in blue and motherless scum. Both scenes ring home with authenticity. Not a bad effort from the usual history manglers of Hollywood.
John Wayne in a Christmas movie? Yep, The Three Godfathers in 1948! Another fruitful John Ford and John Wayne collaboration, the film was released in December 1948. Three bank robbers, John Wayne, Pedro Armedariz and Harry Carey, Jr., stumble across a dying woman and her newborn son in a desert in the American Southwest. The three outlaws, although they are attempting to elude a posse, promise the dying woman to look after her son. (more…)
You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.
Mattie Ross, True Grit
Charles Portis, the author of True Grit has died at age 86. He joined the Marine Corps during the Korean War. He came out a sergeant in 1955 and began to work as a reporter. He left journalism in 1964, He wrote the novel True Grit in 1968. The movie version that earned John Wayne his best acting Oscar came out in 1969. The good remake came out in 2010. Portis shunned the literary limelight, living in Little Rock, Arkansas, believing his work should speak for itself, and it did and does. I trust Saint Peter will find work for a skilled penman.
On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need for some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.
(I originally posted this at The American Catholic, and I thought the John Wane mavens of Almost Chosen People might enjoy it.)
News that I missed courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
HOLLYWOOD, CA—After a 1971 Playboy interview with John Wayne that was deemed offensive surfaced online, liberal activists took to the streets to boycott the actor, vowing that Wayne will never work in Hollywood again.
Wayne died in 1979 of stomach cancer.
Marchers could be seen on Sunset Boulevard with signs calling for the firing of “that cowboy guy from those old movies.” Many seemed confused about who Wayne actually was, with some assuming he may have been a relative of Batman, and others thinking that maybe he was in a Coen brothers movie or something. However, they all agreed he is what’s wrong with this country, as evidenced by their chant, “John Wayne bad!”
Activist leaders announced that at 10:30 am they would hold a massive burning of John Wayne films, posters, and other memorabilia at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine. When the time arrived, many people arrived but there was nothing to burn. “I don’t think anyone here has ever even seen a John Wayne movie, now that I think about it,” one activist told reporters.
Go here to read the rest. Hmmm. Wayne has been dead for four decades, but in a fight between him and any number of Social Justice Warriors, my money would still be on the Duke.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), perhaps the greatest of Westerns, contains this gem of a scene with John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Jimmy Stewart, Strother Marvin, Lee Van Cleef and Woody Strode. Marvin as Liberty Valance is the archetypal mercenary gunslinger, his days, and the days of his kind, about to come to an end. Wayne as Tom Doniphon, rancher, is the obverse of Marvin, a man just as tough as Valance, if not tougher, but no bully. However, his time is also closing. Their destroyer? The almost clown like figure of Ransom Stoddard, portrayed by Jimmy Stewart. He knows nothing about guns, but he knows a lot about law, and law and civilization are fast coming to the range. This is John Ford’s eulogy to the Old West, and to this type of Western. (more…)
This Fourth of July long weekend is made for a trip down American history courtesy of John Wayne films. Wayne was an American original. Thirty seven years after his death, in the annual Harris poll of favorite actors, he ranks number four overall, and number one among men voting.In his day he was never shy about declaring his love of country, and he did so when patriotism was fashionable and when it was unfashionable. An American icon, the deathbed convert to the Catholic Church is a symbol of this nation, instantly recognizable around the globe. Here are some of his films set in the history of this land.
Allegheny Uprising (1939)-The film tells the true story of the Black Boys Rebellion against the British in 1765, with Wayne portraying James Smith the leader of this proto-American Revolution.
2. The Fighting Kentuckian (1949)-John Wayne costars with Oliver Hardy, yeah, that Oliver Hardy, in a tale of veterans of the War of 1812 helping French settlers battle land swindlers in Alabama. Very loosely based on actual events. In one scene Wayne explains that his family never had money due to his father’s health being ruined after he spent a winter at a place called Valley Forge.
3. The Alamo (1960)-The epic story of the battle for Texan Independence. Wayne’s love note to America and freedom.
4. The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958)-One of the more successful American diplomats of the Nineteenth Century, Townsend Harris, a native of New York City, became wealthy in the China trade in the early part of the century. He then turned to public service, serving as the President of the New York City Board of Education from 1846-1848. He founded the Free Academy of the City of New York, later renamed as the City College of New York, in order to provide college educations to low income people in New York.
In July 1856, Franklin Pierce named him the first American consul general to the Empire of Japan. He opened the first American consulate in Japan in the city of Shimoda. Overcoming enormous difficulties, in two years he negotiated what has become known as the Harris Treaty, which established full diplomatic and trade relations between Japan and the US.
On the hundredth anniversary of the treaty in 1958, John Wayne, in one of the oddest films of his career, starred as Townsend Harris in the film The Barbarian and the Geisha. Few men could have been more unlike John Wayne than Harris, and Wayne appears uncomfortable in the role of the diplomat to me. The film played up an alleged romance between Harris and Okichi, a 17 year old housekeeper, which has long been a tale told in Japan. Unfortunately, this aspect of the story is untrue. Harris fired Okichi after she worked for him for three days due to the fact that he considered her to be an incompetent housekeeper. However, the look of the film is splendid, even if the film is the usual Hollywood mix of lies and half-truths.
5. The Horse Soldiers (1959)-In 1959 John Ford and John Wayne, in the last of their “cavalry collaborations”, made The Horse Soldiers, a film based on Harold Sinclair’s novel of the same name published in 1956, which is a wonderful fictionalized account of Grierson’s Raid.
Perhaps the most daring and successful Union cavaly raid of the war, Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher and band leader from Jacksonville, Illinois, who, after being bitten by a horse at a young age, hated horses, led from April 17-May 2, 1863 1700 Illinois and Iowa troopers through 600 miles of Confederate territory from southern Tennessee to the Union held Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Grierson and his men ripped up railroads, burned Confederate supplies and tied down many times their number of Confederate troops and succeeded in giving Grant a valuable diversion as he began his movement against Vicksburg.
John Wayne gives a fine, if surly, performance as Colonel Marlowe, the leader of the Union cavalry brigade. William Holden as a Union surgeon serves as a foil for Wayne. Constance Towers, as a captured Southern belle, supplies the obligatory Hollywood love interest.
Overall the film isn’t a bad treatment of the raid, and the period. I especially appreciated two scenes. John Wayne refers to his pre-war activities as “Before this present insanity” and Constance Towers gives the following impassioned speech:
Well, you Yankees and your holy principle about savin’ the Union. You’re plunderin’ pirates that’s what. Well, you think there’s no Confederate army where you’re goin’. You think our boys are asleep down here. Well, they’ll catch up to you and they’ll cut you to pieces you, you nameless, fatherless scum. I wish I could be there to see it.
Both scenes ring home with authenticity. Not a bad effort from the usual history manglers of Hollywood.(Although there are still errors enough, including Union soldiers worrying about being captured and sent to Andersonville prior to the POW camp being constructed by the Confederates in 1864.)
6. The Searchers (1956)-Set in Reconstruction Texas, John Wayne gives the performance of his career as embittered Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards and his vengeance ride against Comanches who slaughtered his family.
Some people work an entire lifetime and wonder if they ever made a difference to the world. But the Marines don’t have that problem.
President Ronald Reagan, letter to Lance Corporal Joe Hickey, September 23, 1983
On November 10, 1775 the Continental Congress passed this resolution authored by John Adams:
“Resolved, That two battalions of Marines be raised consisting of one colonel, two lieutenant-colonels, two majors, and other officers, as usual in other regiments; that they consist of an equal number of privates with other battalions; that particular care be taken that no persons be appointed to office, or enlisted into said battalions but such as are good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve with advantage by sea when required; that they be enlisted and commissioned to serve for and during the present War with Great Britain and the colonies, unless dismissed by order of Congress; that they be distinguished by names of First and Second Battalions of American Marines, and that they be considered as part of the number which the Continental Army before Boston is ordered to consist of.”
At the various birthday celebrations by the Marine Corps today, the song given pride of place will of course be the Marines’ Hymn. The oldest of the official songs of a branch of the US military, the composer of the Marines’ Hymn is unknown, but is thought to have been a Marine serving in Mexico during the Mexican War, hence the “Halls of Montezuma”. The music is taken from the Gendarmes Duet from the Opera Genevieve de Brabant, written by Jacques Offenback in 1859. (more…)
The last cabinet level Secretary of the Navy, and the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal was not content to remain in Washington. As Secretary of the Navy during World War II he often visited the sites of active combat operations. Thus it was that he was present on Iwo Jima when the flag was raised on Mount Suribachi. What he said then has entered the lore of the Marine Corps:
The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.
Appointed the first Secretary of Defense in 1947, Forrestal fought against budget cuts proposed by President Truman that he thought endangered the nation’s security. He also opposed the proposal to unify the services which would gut the Navy and eliminate the Marine Corps. On March 31, 1949, Harry Truman, angered over Forrestal’s opposition to his policies, fired him. Tragically, Forrestal, who had worked non-stop on Defense issues since he joined the Roosevelt administration in 1940, had a nervous breakdown. While undergoing psychiatric treatment he committed suicide by jumping from the 16th floor of the National Naval Medical Center. He left behind a note with a quotation from Sophocles’ Ajax:
Appearing in the film were several Marine veterans of the Pacific, including Colonel David Shoup, who earned a Medal of Honor for his heroism at Tarawa, and who would later serve as a Commandant of the Corps, and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Crow who led a Marine battalion at Tarawa. TheMarines’ Hymn is sung in the film after the death of Wayne’s character, one of ten films in which a Wayne character died, and as the raising of the flag is recreated.
Taking part in the flag raising were Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes and John Bradley, the three survivors of the six flag raisers. (The three men who raised the flag and subsequently died in the battle were Franklin Sousely, Harlon Block and Michael Strank.) (First Lieutenant Harold Schrier, who led the flag raising party that raised the first, smaller, flag on Mount Suribachi, and who was awarded a Navy Cross and a Silver Star for his heroism on Iwo Jima, also appeared in the film.) The flag on top of Mount Suribachi could be seen across the island, and was greeted with cheers by the Marines and blaring horns by the ships of the Navy. A mass was said on Mount Suribachi at the time of the flag raising and I have written about that here. (more…)
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 