John Wayne Stand Up

John Wayne Stand Up

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The cinema's heroes and families were much less secure than television's. Westems and epics alike defined the hero as someone to whom violence is done; loser, martyr or victim, the liberal hero was passive, defensive, unwilling or unable to take the initiative himself.

There was an inescapable taint of masochism in the inevitability with which James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, even Gary Cooper, were deliberately maimed and humiliated. Heston seldom survived an epic without being stripped and mutilated at least once.

Younger male stars, trained in the neurotic mannerisms of the Method school of acting, took the performance of physical and emotional vulnerability even further. What often seemed to be being celebrated was their capacity to soak up punishment, and no-one responded better to this treatment than the sulky and indecipherable Marlon Brando, whose mumbling was always most justified after a beating. Even John Wayne, the great icon of conservative male stability, did not escape without having repression and neurosis attached to his character in John Ford's The Searchers