Now Playing at the Valencia

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Essays on Movies

Stephen Hunter

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780743282017
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic and New York Times bestselling author Stephen Hunter comes a brilliant, freewheeling, and witty look at the movies. Evanston, Illinois, was an idyllic 1950s paradise with stately homes, a beautiful lake, a world-class university, two premier movie houses, and one very seedy movie theater—the Valencia.
This was the site of Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter's misspent youth. Instead of going to school, picking up girls, or tossing a football, Hunter could be found sitting in the fifteenth row, right-hand aisle seat of the Valencia, sating himself on one B-list movie after another.The Valencia had a sticky floor, smelly bathrooms, ancient popcorn, and a screen set in a hideously tacky papier-mache castle wall. It was also the only place in town to see westerns, sci-fi pictures, cops 'n' robbers flicks, slapstick comedy, and Godzilla.In Now Playing at the Valencia, the bestselling thriller author Stephen Hunter has compiled his favorite movie reviews written between 1997 and 2003, bringing to the discussion the passionate feelings for cinema he discovered in the '50s, a time when genres were forming, mesmerizing stars played unforgettable characters, and enduring classics were made. While filmmaking has changed tremendously since Hunter first frequented the Valencia, the view from the fifteenth row, and the thrill of down and dirty entertainment, has remained the same.

One

WESTERNS

Stand on a hilltop in this widest of open spaces and look a hundred miles in every direction, and there’s not a human construct in existence except the vehicle that brought you there.

But John Wayne is here. You can feel him in the wind, you can see him through the mirages, in the clumps of cottonwoods, you can sense him where the streams cut the rolling land. He’s here in the landscape.

The skies are magnificent: No artist born since 1900 could capture the subtlety of tone fused with the vastness of scope. The green of prairie, unnatural this late in the summer, runs toward forever. Antelope actually play. Buffalo actually roam.

It’s a land for big men, almost a cathedral. In The Searchers, Wayne’s greatest film, the Comanche chief Scar called him “Big Shoulders,” and only an emptiness like this, vaulted by a sky like that, seems capable of accommodating those shoulders, that distinctive, graceful way of carrying so much muscle and authority, the look of ferocity that came so quickly to his face and warned all and sundry to steer clear or face lethal consequences. Ask Liberty Valance: He found out the hard way.

Indoors, John Wayne is even more prominent. Here in Ingomar, Montana, population 125 people, 17,650 cattle, 20 bison, 2 llamas, and 247,532 prairie dogs, the town center is an agreeable old bar called the Jersey Lily, where the beer is cold, the steaks tough, and the beans plentiful. On the dust-blown streets it always looks as if a gunfight is about to erupt, but inside it’s warm and friendly. Discouraging words are not heard; folks smile a lot more than they frown and will generally drink to or with anyone.

But here’s the cool part: If you close your eyes after a beer or two, or a bean or 700, you can see him standing there at the end of the long stretch of bar. He’s wearing that pinkish bib shirt, that leather vest, that dirty pale-tan hat. He’s got beef everywhere on his body, but not fat. The gun, worn high on his hip in working cowman’s practicality, not low after the gunslinger style, is the Colt Single Action Army .38-40, with the yellowing ivory grips. The eyes are wary, rich in wisdom, impatient with pilgrims, tenderfeet, and blanketheads, possibly incapable of expressing love because they are so fixed on duty. He is what for decades was a vision of the ideal man.

Now it gets even cooler: Put down that beer, relax those eyes, and you can see that it’s not a writer’s florid fantasy. The Duke is there, as I’ve described him; well, a full-size movie cutout, from the days when the studios advanced their products by sending such cardboard images of the star to stand sentinel in the nation’s movie houses. Somehow the Lily got one—it’s from early-seventies Wayne; I would guess Chisum or Big Jake or possibly The Train Robbers.

But that’s not all. Look in the other direction, and he’s there, too. His portrait hangs at the bar’s other end, though it’s not the classic Duke from the pictures, but the mature, prosperous rancher Duke, with a lot of miles on him, but a sense of abiding peace in his eyes as well. You’re in a bar but you’re also in a sacred glade, a place of worship, pilgrim.

And the Duke is back there in your swank, stuffier East, too. I saw him on the tube there. A beer commercial, just as clever as previous versions, in which by some digital magic he is computer-inserted into a modern scenario, demonstrating that 20-odd years after his death, he’s still a star. His antagonist is some kind of yuppie entrepreneur who wants to close a neighborhood bar. The Duke—the images appear to be purloined from the great John Ford classic of Irish schmaltz, The Quiet Man—appears and gives him a good going-over. The beer’s on him, literally, as someone douses the yup with a pitcher of brew, wilting his $4,000 Armani suit, and it’s so wonderful!

Wayne’s a staple on AMC and TCM, those two wondrous small-screen custodians of the movie past, where you’ll encounter him at various ages, in various positions of command or valor, fighting on till the end. In fact, American Movie Classics featured a thirty-six-movie Duke package during its Film Preservation Festival last month.

He’s even there in his absence. I had a professional obligation ten days ago to sit through a film called American Outlaws, which was a horror so intense it would have frightened Joseph Conrad, connoisseur of horror. Among the things it lacked, besides plot and character and intelligence and emotion, was a star. It was full of Peter Pans who walked ever so light in their boots, almost as if flying. The hero looked to be about seven. Soaking wet, with pockets full of nickels, he might have weighed 100 pounds. He had the gravitas of a minnow.

The old Hollywood knew and the new Hollywood doesn’t: You don’t get gravitas by pointing a camera at a pleasant young face and turning it on. You get gravitas by some special alchemy between face and film as transmuted through lens and tweaked by light, until what registers is larger and more powerful than what is. Wayne had this, though not at the start and possibly not at the end. Still, along with Bogart and Monroe and Grant and maybe one or two others, his physical radiance—that is, the accumulation of face and body and movement, small things like the carriage of the hands and the tilt of the jaw—he imprinted himself upon the consciousness of a generation.

So many of us rode the big wave in baby flesh that rolled across the country between 1946 and 1960, and those were the Duke’s best years, when he ruled at the box office and in the imagination. He was the man we wished our fathers were, and of course they were too busy to notice, too busy catching up for the four years the Nazis and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere stole from them. So he raised us more than they did.

As I say, he did not come to this point easily. His career, in fact, may be divided into six parts. In the beginning, he was merely beautiful; then he became heroic if still simple; then, a full adult in command of his considerable powers, he was complex; then, like an angry, disappointed father, he turned bitter and contentious; he was finally avuncular, a self-parody, a king during an idyll, I suppose. And we are in the sixth stage right now.

Wayne, born Marion Michael Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907, came west as a child and grew up in California. The story of his rise is well enough known:As a college student, he was a movie roustabout when not playing football for USC. That devil-genius in the guise of Irish blarney and guile known as John Ford took a liking to him. As Ford would later say, “I never knew the big son of a bitch could act.”

Well, at first he couldn’t. His early roles in cheesy westerns—Randy Rides Alone would be my favorite, not that I’ve seen it—are negligible. He got a break in 1930, when Raoul Walsh, under Ford’s urging, starred him in The Big Trail. It was a catastrophe, and if you’ve been able to sit through four or five minutes of it, you know why: He has almost no resources, as an actor. He just sits there; his untrained voice, particularly, is a disgrace, a light, wispy thing that cracks often and is almost uninflected. You think: Really, this guy should go back to pushing the props around the set.

That humiliation gone by, he then endured nine more years of near-starvation in the poverty-row westerns. But as he aged, he got less pretty and far more interesting. His face acquired weight, density, and a webbing of creases; it came to appear geologic, as fissures of wisdom ruptured its serenity. His eyes grew savvy; when the camera came on, you didn’t sense panic, and before he spoke, he didn’t take a deep breath; he’d learned to avoid two early flaws.

The new Wayne was defined as a star in a single movie, Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939. Talk about a moment. Nobody ever got one like the Duke in this picture. The camera finds him, in buckskins, wary and tired, on the run. His horse has been shot and he stands by the side of a Monument Valley road, carrying a saddle and a rifle, as the titular vehicle approaches. The camera zooms in—the only zoom in the picture—and Wayne, as the Ringo Kid, does this cool move with his sawed-off, large-levered Winchester (a ’92, also .38-40 for all of you who demand to be in the know); he spins it, cocking it as it flashes under his armpit. Only a 6-foot-4 guy could do that; Chuck Connors had the same move on fifties TV in The Rifleman, and he was another honest 6-foot-4.

It was a moment of such grace and power and masculine majesty, rivaled by only a few others. It contained in an instant all that would become classic Duke: the Westerner, lean, laconic, isolated, grandly picturesque but totally repressed, graceful, and direct. He’d never be a sex guy: His movie love affairs were more like buddy deals, where love was expressed in affectionate needling, but never the abject statement of pure emotion. He was most usually a duty guy, doing what had to be done. If it involved killing, as it so often did, the killing was done out of necessity, not out of pleasure. He acquired wisdom that built toward a command presence like no other. And this was at a time when the gift of command was so important.

The war arrived—Wayne was thirty-four, with four kids at home, so he fought it on the home front—when his maturity and natural authority made him the perfect officer or sergeant. He commanded marines and Seabees, fighter pilots, paratroopers, submarines, naval vessels, almost every single fighting contrivance in almost every theater of war, though he did miss the Aleutians. I suppose he missed North Africa, too.

Our fathers cheered him then; we cheered him later. In the fifties, that is, when these movies were rerun endlessly on TV, which also carried ads for his new movies, so that it was a Duke-rich environment wherever you turned. I discovered him during commercials for Hondo, one of his lesser pictures, but even shrunk small by a black-and-white TV, his charisma was vivid enough to leap from the small screen and ensnare a kid’s inner brain. Joan Didion said it best: John Wayne “would control the shape of our dreams.”

When Wayne worked with excellent directors, the result, embarrassing for everyone, was that rare thing called art. He said (I love this quote): “I never had a goddam artistic problem in my life, never, and I’ve worked with the best of them. John Ford isn’t exactly a bum, is he? Yet he never gave me any crap about art.”

That may have been true. But the best directors—Ford in at least six great movies: Stagecoach, The Long Voyage Home (1940), They Were Expendable (1945), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man(1952), and, of course, The Searchers (1956), but also Howard Hawks in Red River (1948), and William Wellman in The High and the Mighty(1954)—located a darkness within him. They saw through the delusions of the über-male’s perpetual righteousness, and found a tragic dimension in his stubborn strength, his insane heroism, his need to dominate and rule.

That’s why, of all the performances, I like best his Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, for here is a man so crippled by hate, so riddled by anger and the need for blood vengeance, that he loses his way. His will is titanic; his rage is more titanic; it dries up his love, and though he performs an Odyssey-scale task of heroism in finding the kidnapped daughter of his dead brother and though in the end he steps back from the cruelest savagery, it is too late. He is exiled, and that sad last scene lingers forever: The door closes and he’s condemned, like the Comanche brave whose eyes he shot out earlier, to wander between the winds.

We knew, somehow, that Wayne had a darkness in him. But we trusted he would use it only against enemies. He would protect us. That is why we loved him so. Then we thought he used it against us. That is why we hated him so.

The war in Vietnam, of course, sundered families everywhere. It sundered, too, the metaphorical family of John Wayne the father and his children, the baby-boom generation. He insisted that the war that would kill us was a war like the one he had known, where the enemy was absolute, where the nation itself and its way of life were at stake, where the necessary killing and inevitable dying were sanctified by its higher justification.

We believed it was a new thing, a war of national liberation, and that it didn’t endanger our culture. We also believed—I think it’s safe to say this now—that we didn’t want our asses wasted in some jungle hellhole.

Who was right? That fight still goes on, and if I have an answer I will keep it to myself. Symbolically, however, it was waged most bitterly over Wayne’s film—he starred and directed—The Green Berets, which was loathed by millions of kids and loved by millions of other Americans. (Did you know it was the fourth-top-grossing movie of 1968? It was really quite a hit.)

Well, it is pretty awful. The first half is a not-quite-convincing account of the defense of a Special Forces camp (the pine trees of Fort Bragg, where it was shot, somewhat dilute the illusion that we’re in Vietnam) and the wooing of a liberal journalist to the hawk side; the second is an even lamer secret mission behind enemy lines to snatch a general, complete with a dragon-lady secret agent and some of the most condescending sequences of Asian culture ever shot. In its way, it answers the question: Why are we in Vietnam? But the answer is not the one Wayne thought he was giving; it was: because we thought that Vietnam was North Carolina and our Asian allies were children or seductresses, and that the sun sets in the east.

Wayne was truly damaged by the outrage his film stirred, and the bitterness his presence engendered. From then on, he just played John Wayne over and over again, in a series of unpersuasive but occasionally amusing films (True Grit, for Henry Hathaway, was his Oscar winner, but lord, I wish Pappy Ford had directed it!), growing older and fatter and somehow more ridiculous. His two most absurd films occur in this period (I am discounting 1956’s insane The Conqueror, where he played Genghis Khan): his two Dirty Harry/Bullitt rip-offs, McQ and Brannigan. John Wayne should never wear a suit coat, because his shoulders are so ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1  Westerns
• 2  Crime and Suspense
• 3  War
• 4  Costumes!
• 5  Yuks
• 6  Monsters and Sci-fi
• 7  Toons
• 8  A Last Visit to the Valencia
• INDEX