Young Wayne Blazed a Big Trail
Discussing John Wayne's first major film, The Big Trail, with Richard Schickel.
Categories: Westerns
By: Henry Cabot Beck 06/01/2008
That reminds me of the difference between Ward Bond’s deathbed scene in Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, which is soaked with sentimentality, and the deathbed scene of the pilot in Hawks’s Air Force, which is not.
[Hawks’s deathbed scene] is a great scene. I’m playing that death scene [on my “American Masters” special], which I think is the greatest of all death scenes. I like the fact that it just doesn’t make much of it, except you can see in everybody’s faces they’re having real feelings.
Walsh seemed to have hit his peak period when he was at Warner Brothers—The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, Gentleman Jim, White Heat.
High Sierra, The Strawberry Blonde, the Errol Flynn war movies—anyway, I think that was a good match of studio and director. They Drive By Night. And he got along well there, got along well with Jack Warner [laughs]. He was an agreeable guy, a hardworking guy. Jack would lean on him—please do it for me, and Raoul would generally say okay and take the job.
So did Walsh discover John Wayne for The Big Trail?
He was very proud of, as he feels—I think it was a source of contention between he and Ford [laughs]—that he sort of found John Wayne. John Wayne had made some pictures where he had played small roles and so forth, but The Big Trail was the first leading part for John Wayne, and Raoul believed that he gave Wayne his name. He said he was reading a book about the American revolutionary general “Mad” Anthony Wayne; he thought Wayne would be a good name for Marion Morrison. That’s how the name came about.
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