John Wayne’s life and career in movies defined for millions of people what it meant to be a hero, an American and a man. For others, he became to represent the deep division in our culture at the time of the Viet Nam War that continues to persist in our national debate today. However, when you examine the work he did in Lone Pine, the lasting images of the man, the actor and the legend are much more complex than that.

Actor John Wayne, his films and Lone Pine just seemed meant for each other. With the background of the mountains, and the harsh desert landscapes, the lone figure of the cowboy struggling to right the wrongs of society against the “little guy” are as appealing to the people here today as ever. The American myth, the idea we seem to absorb from our culture as children and which we use to guide the direction of our lives, attached itself to the film images of John Wayne in a process that took several decades to complete. Academics using the disciplines of psychology, sociology and historical analysis have spent much time understanding and then explaining this process. We are fortunate here that we have the land, we can see the movies and think about the stories of John Wayne the man and the actor working here to understand what we already know in some intuitive way. Whether you like John Wayne and his movies, or not, he is important in telling us about who we are today as a people and how we got there.

John Wayne was a self-creation, someone who became famous with a name not his birth name, who had a nickname derived from a dog, who became a man who could manipulate his role choices and mold the roles themselves to fit his own image of himself. Famous as a cowboy, he never had worked as a real one. Noted as a film war hero, he never got into Annapolis and never fought in a war. John Wayne was confident enough, and sure enough in his beliefs that the contradictions between who people thought he was based on his movies and who he actually was bothered him little.

His acting seemed based on the technique of “putting John Wayne in a situation and seeing what he would do.” Unlike the actors who disappear into their roles, more often than not, the roles taken on by this actor disappeared into John Wayne’s persona. It was a complex persona at times, evolving throughout his long career. As Joseph Campbell told us in his writing on hero mythology, John Wayne was “a hero with a thousand faces.”

The man was born Marion Michael Morrison on May 26, 1907 in Winterset, Iowa. His father a pharmacist there, had a lung condition which required a warmer drier climate and the family moved to Lancaster, California. However, the family could not make a living at ranching, and the family moved to Glendale where eventually Wayne’s father set up his own pharmacy business. It was there that the young boy got a large Airedale named “Duke,” and the name stuck to the boy as well as the dog. He excelled in school and showed great promise in football and barely missed getting accepted into Annapolis. He went to USC on a football scholarship, spending the summers as a laborer. When he asked his football coach for advice on what to do for employment, the coach arranged jobs for John and another player with Tom Mix. The cowboy star had asked for goods seats at the USC games and the coach had exchanged the tickets for jobs.

Tom Mix used Wayne for training purposes by taking exercise runs with him. Mix was getting ready to star in the film The Great K & A Train Robbery. He also arranged for Wayne to work on the “swing gang,” making $35 a week moving props and sets around the studio. It was then that director John Ford encountered Marion (who only later would become John Wayne) and Ford challenged Wayne to demonstrate his football skills. Ford knocked the young athlete into a mud puddle, but when the young man challenged Ford to try it again, the tables were turned and Ford hit the ground with a thud. Reportedly Ford was at first angry and then amused.

Wayne continued to work as a prop man for Ford pictures and had a few bit parts in Ford’s film Hangman’s House (1928) where Wayne destroys a fence cheering so enthusiastically at a race. He may have worked unbilled in other films but actually had screen credit as Duke Morrison in another film Words and Music (1929). Several other small roles followed when he was picked out by Roaul Walsh for his epic western The Big Trail (1930). The western was shot both in regular 35 mm and in wide screen 70 mm. The studio gave the actor the name John Wayne and he was trained in various skills including knife throwing and handling tomahawks.

The movie flopped at the box office not because of the acting of the new lead actor, but by the same token he couldn’t save the film as he did with many mediocre films years later. The failure of the film stuck with John Wayne and quickly he was back where he started, paying his dues with minor roles and low budget films and serials. His career took an upswing when he was signed to do a series of westerns produced by Leon Schlesinger at Warner Brothers. Four of these were remakes of earlier silent films starring Ken Maynard and it is with Somewhere in Sonor a(1933), one of these films, that Wayne becomes associated with Lone Pine.

Stock footage was clearly snipped from the earlier silent Maynard film which was made in Lone Pine. It is difficult to determine if Wayne did any of his own work in Lone Pine for the film. He is dressed like Maynard and in long shots is identical to Maynard. Is it Maynard or is it Wayne in Lone Pine? Apparently the negative of the original film was used for the borrowed footage and the original Maynard film does not survive. Clearly Wayne was filmed in areas similar to the rocks in Lone Pine but they could be somewhere like Joshua Tree.

In the film he plays John Bishop who has been wrongly accused of cheating at a rodeo. He crosses into Mexico and learns of a plan to rob a silver mine belonging to the father of his girl friend. He joins the gang and ultimately outsmarts them, in process returning the lost son to his old boss. The son is played by Paul Fix who will play with Wayne in many more pictures over the years.

Perhaps in Wayne’s first Lone Pine film the fates were telling him he needed to work in this location. At any rate, he would return to Lone Pine for twelve more films and his last appearance before a camera. Lone Pine and John Wayne’s futures were ineluctably linked!

(In the next article we will examine several of the roles Wayne played in B westerns made in Lone Pine in the 1930’s.)

Chris Langley can be reached at 760-937-1189 or at lonepinemovies@aol.com.