Saturday, September 11, 2010

John Wayne Tribute Weekend

Gary Dobbs is having a weekend tribute to John Wayne over at The Tainted Archive.  You can check out my contribution here, and while you're over there be sure to read all the other fine posts.

6 comments:

nephite blood spartan heart said...

Will do!

pattinase (abbott) said...

It took me a long time to come around to John Wayne. He always seemed wooden. What won me over was the quality of the movies he was in. So I gradually watched a lot of then and after a while his acting style began to make sense. It was him and changing it made no more sense than Cary Grant trying to discard his charm or Clark Gable his masculinity.

Suresh Ramasubramanian said...

Comancheros wasn't my favorite Duke movie, not by a long chalk.

From the more famous ones - sure, Stagecoach was absolutely brilliant, but that owed a lot to John Ford. The man who killed Liberty Valance was great too. Rio Bravo was not bad at all (taken by itself .. without considering the high noon bashfest howard hawks made it into)

From his later movies: Rooster Cogburn was quite nice - though I made the mistake (!) of reading True Grit first. It is very rare for me to enjoy a movie AFTER I've read the book it was based on, and True Grit was a very nice book to read.

His last movie was the best one he ever made, bar none. The Shootist. I read the Glendon Swarthout book it was based on before and after I watched it. Of course the duke had cancer when he made it, and Lauren Bacall had seen Bogart die of cancer ..

Cap'n Bob said...

The Duke was good in The Shootist but the ending was a cop out in my book. In Swarthout's, too.

Suresh Ramasubramanian said...

The Duke could never, ever resist dying with his boots on when he couldn't ride off into the sunset :)

Shooting a man in the back and then getting shot himself by a kid? Nosirree bob, that's not what the duke does.

Suresh Ramasubramanian said...

Speaking of Rooster Cogburn, the coen brothers remake of True Grit looks good.

Jeff Bridges playing the duke's role, there's Matt Damon and Josh Brolin as well.

Sure going to be gritty and violent, if "no country for old men" is any indicator of what's coming up.