Core Response #1

Wills’ article states that “John Ford invented John Wayne,” but I cannot agree with this totally. Perhaps Ford helped to shape Wayne into the rugged Western star that he became, but the presence and persona that attracted audiences to that cowboy was all courtesy to Wayne himself and it was present before he was a star.

John Wayne (or rather Marion Morrison) went to my high school. He is by far the most famous person to ever attend Glendale High School, and the school has not forgotten it. Not to say that the school makes a super big deal about it—after all the school now has about 4,000 students and it is awfully hard to get that many teenagers to care about anything—but everyone knew that he went there. And the life size cut out of him that still resides in the yearbook room would not let you forget it.

During GHS’s 100^th anniversary my freshman year, a reel of Morrison giving a speech during his time as senior class president was shown and let me tell you, he was as much of a star to the class of 1925 as he was during his film career. First off, you could see girls in the audience fawning over him. And why shouldn’t they? After all he was senior class president, editor-in-chief of the newspaper, and a star on the football team that had won the championship the year before. For a school that’s sports program has had a very consistent record of being the laughing stock in comparison to our rivals that is a big accomplishment (we literally have about 10 football championships out of 107 years).

Morrison already was the epitome of the all American boy. Tall, clean-cut, handsome, patriotic. He’d already been nicknamed “The Duke” early in life and went by that name in high school. (On a side note, that nickname is after his childhood dog… very similar to a certain Harrison Ford role.) He already was everything that men wanted to be and what women wanted to be with. He followed this pattern when he gained a football scholarship to USC, where he also was a Trojan Knight and a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.

Thus, Ford may be able to take credit for the name John Wayne and developing his career, but he had an ample amount of material to work with. Ford just knew how to mold Wayne so to reach his full potential. To use Britton’s words, Wayne’s presence in Westerns was a “concrete case of the complementary relation between star personae and between the genre and vehicle.” Wayne’s star persona was so suited to Westerns because the producers were basically taking Morrison, putting him in a costume, telling him what to say, and let his natural temperament do the rest. Wayne’s films were such valuable commodities because the three elements (persona, genre, and vehicle) fit so well together.