Seeing films as historical artifacts from the time in which they were produced is one way to analyze their content. John Wayne made many movies in the middle 1930’s in Lone Pine with the theme of economic distress of the individual and the financial depression of the community. In almost every case, the bad guy was exploiting the individual ranchers and the newly settled communities for financial exploitation. Members of his fan base were experience very bad times, and in actor John Wayne’s world, crime and greed were the main causes of the economic depression of the community..

Blue Steel (1934) presents a community being starved out by the town merchant Melgrove who cannot restock his shelves unless the supply train gets though. Of course, his men have intercepted the supplies each time because he wants control of the gold under the land. He makes the offer, “Men, I have a little money-not much, but I will do this. In order that you can get out, I’ll give you a hundred dollars each for your homesteads. I’m takingt a long chance of ever getting my money back, but I’ll risk it.”

In The Man From Utah (1934), Wayne rides out to save a rodeo that is being exploited by bad guys intent on making money through "thrown" races. Again, as with Blue Steel, in The Lawless Range (1935) the local banker is scaring settlers off their land so he can get control of a vein of gold that runs under their property. In The New Frontier (1935) Wayne has taken over leading wagon trains for his father who has settled down as Sheriff only to be killed by Saloon owner Ace Holmes who intends to run the town for his own financial gain. In The Oregon Trail (1935) Wayne goes in search of his father who has disappeared while leading a supply train. The caravan has been attacked, the supplies taken, and the men left to starve to death in the snowy mountains. In King of the Pecos (1936) (as in Westward Ho) Wayne's parents have been killed by Salamander Stiles because they would not sell to him to forward his plan for a million acre ranch. Symbolically, Stiles is killed in the end, crushed by his own new safe.

The themes are clear, if somewhat simplistically spelled out, in this series of one hour B westerns as Wayne rebuilt his career after the set back of The Big Trail discussed in last month’s column. The whose style was to become famous already has everything we would later come to easily recognize as “John Wayne” in these films. As Allen Eyles points out in his book John Wayne and the Movies, there was the “same appealing sense of youthful sincerity,,, the likeable, gauche manner, awkward but genuine, the side ways smile or open mouthed grin, the sense of largely unexplored but real strength of personality.” While sometimes being doubled by famed stuntman Yakima Canutt, Wayne also had a definite physical presence in these films. In Blue Steel he is seen riding between two horse, sweeping up the heroine who has fallen from her horse, and dealing with two men in a barn, hanging one upside down by his feet.

His screen presence in these “oaters” did not go unnoticed. Motion Picture Herald noted in its review of Blue Steel, “Of Wayne’s popularity there can be little question, and a certain quota of western fans can be relied upon to respond to the call of Wayne’s name on the theatre marquee.” Bosley Crowthers also took note of Wayne in the New York Times. As Randy Roberts and James K. Olson in their biography, John Wayne American, summarized, “John Wayne, etched against the background of Mt. Whitney and the High Sierra, was difficult to ignore. By the time his Republic contract expired, he was America’s leading B Western star. In a nation that had long enshrined the Western hero, John Wayne was America’s leading film cowboy.”

Wayne’s personal life was not fairing as well. He had married Josephine Saenz in 1933 and their union produced four children. But the long hours working on location in places like Lone Pine, and the fact that Wayne took up with a group of friends like John Ford, a circle of hard drinking, hard working, fighting, gambling and boating buddies took its toll. Coming from such different backgrounds, perhaps it was inevitable, but the marriage eventually ended.

In a long quote from Wayne, John Tuska was able to capture how Wayne saw the characters he was developing in these films, a role he would repeat in various guises throughout his career. He quotes Wayne looking back from the perspective of time, …I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability. I felt many of the Western stars of the twenties and thirties were just too goddamn perfect. They never drank or smoked. They never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl…. Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back….I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes. Who enjoys kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to. I made the western hero a roughneck." (Note: In next article (Part 3) we will explore more of Wayne's Lone Pine work.)

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.