What Is So Fascinating About This American Icon?

Would this Trojan have been any help at Corvallis last week?John Wayne is one of those essentially blank screens upon which America likes to project itself, & often the America projected on The Duke is not popular w/ fellow travelers, comsymps & pinkos. This can result in their denying Marion Morrison's (related to Jimbo Morrison?) considerable acting ability, or mocking the very principles on which America was founded (a powerful agent, front-end money, & a big piece of the back-end gross). Susan King of the L. A. Times covers the John Wayne retrospective academic (They're just movies, f'r cripe's sake!) blatherfest ("John Wayne: Actor, Star, Icon, Trojan.") at the University of Spoiled Children thislast wknd. And look, it's the man who personifies middle-brow film criticism, Leonard Maltin!

The 1953 3-D western "Hondo," in which Wayne plays a dispatch rider for the cavalry who meets a woman (Geraldine Page) living alone with her young son in the middle of hostile Apache territory, screens Sunday evening. Maltin believes it's one of Wayne's finest performances. "There's one long scene early on when he is talking to her while hammering some horseshoes. He has to hammer them, he has to fire them with the bellows, cool them in the water and hang them to dry on a rack. He has important dialogue through the entire scene where he is establishing his relationship with her while he performs all of these tasks. It's like choreography. And he pulls it off flawlessly and seemingly effortlessly -- Olivier couldn't have done it better."

See? There's some damn acting, philistines!

There's also an exhibition of junk through the next three mos., in a basement somewhere on the USC campus. One more thing to know:

Gretchen Wayne is thrilled at USC's tribute to her father-in-law because it "defines him as more than a movie star. There was more to him, and certainly he loved being a student at USC. He loved education." The Duke possessed a "terrific sense of humor," says Wayne. "He didn't like vulgarity. He certainly didn't like it around women."

What's your 21st century definition of "vulgarity," bee-otch? NB: Actually typed & published late afternoon Tuesday 30 September 2008. We're just trying to look as if we "create" daily.