The Irishman: A Crushing Disappointment

[Ron Ecker]

I wonder what super patriots John Wayne and Ward Bond would think of Donald Trump if they were alive today. Would they see him as a threat to the republic, which he is, or would they wear MAGA hats and sound like Jon Voight?

 

 

 

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

I think that is an easy one:  they would be passing out the MAGA hats with Voight.

[David Andrews]

John Wayne and Ward Bond ducked WW II service, but made They Were Expendable (1945) for John Ford, the most solemn, self-important and boring war movie ever filmed, enlivened only, and too early, by this memorable drunken ditty, "The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga."  Trust me, this is the high point of a film that makes Ford's later docudrama The Wings of Eagles, on his drinking buddy, pilot Frank "Spig" Wead, look like Metrocolor genius:

Expendable co-star Robert Montgomery aspired to become a director, an ambition he eventually achieved in spite of John Ford.  When Montgomery asked Ford if he could direct a simple shot of a PT boat approaching a dock, Ford let him do it, then tore the film out of the camera, threw it on the planks, and hollered, "There's your shot!"  Ford, Wayne and Bond were a tight and mean crew.

At 2 hours and 45 minutes, Otto Preminger's 1965 Pacific War movie with Wayne, In Harm's Way, moves faster than the 2 hour, 15 minute They Were Expendable.

Edited February 19, 2020 by David Andrews

[Ron Ecker]

I think Expendable is the movie where a guy tastes a spoonful from a pot in the kitchen and tells the cook that his soup is lousy. The cook informs the guy that it's a pot full of dish water.  

 

[Joe Bauer]

Just watched the final scenes of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."

"When The Legend Becomes Fact ... Print The Legend."

Donald J. Trump.

"The Man Who Made America Great Again."

Edited February 19, 2020 by Joe Bauer

[Ron Ecker]

1 hour ago, Joe Bauer said:

Donald J. Trump.

"The Man Who Made America Great Again."

Before it's over he could be "The Man Who Shot Liberty."

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

I think anyone can understand why someone would not have wished to serve in the military during the Vietnam War.

But did Bond and Wayne really dodge the service in World War 2?

 

[Joe Bauer]

27 minutes ago, Ron Ecker said:

Before it's over he could be "The Man Who Shot Liberty."

😄

 

 

[Joe Bauer]

27 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

I think anyone can understand why someone would not have wished to serve in the military during the Vietnam War.

But did Bond and Wayne really dodge the service in World War 2?

 

Isn't it obvious?   

Millions of American men like John Wayne knew they could lose everything they had like marriages, jobs, financial means and the ultimate - their limbs and lives- by joining the military in WWII.

They went anyway.

Edited February 19, 2020 by Joe Bauer

[W. Niederhut]

12 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

I think anyone can understand why someone would not have wished to serve in the military during the Vietnam War.

But did Bond and Wayne really dodge the service in World War 2?

 

     In addition to being Chicken Hawks, Bond and Wayne also portrayed tough talking, ex-Confederate heroes who despised wimpy, inept Yankee slave liberators (like Patrick Wayne) in The Searchers-- almost as if the film was a Western sequel to the mythology of Birth of a Nation.   At one point in the movie, John Wayne (Ethan) even declares that, "the only oath (he) ever took was to the Confederate States of America."

     That was, obviously, the prevailing Dunner School mythology of Civil War and Reconstruction era history-- that all Yankee Yellow Legs were inept, cowardly Carpet Baggers, and Confederate renegades like Ethan and the outlaw Josey Wales were rugged American heroes.  (Part of the old myth that the Civil War wasn't really about slavery.)

     From what I've read, Joseph McBride is a national authority on The Searchers, so I'll defer to his opinion on the subject.

[James DiEugenio]

John Wayne's 1971 Playboy interview:

With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

... I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

The military issue is more complicated.  His studio threatened to sue him if he went into the service since he had a family deferment and was 34 years old.  He did try to get into the OSS, and was accepted but there was a mail mix up.

[David Andrews]

7 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

     In addition to being Chicken Hawks, Bond and Wayne also portrayed tough talking, ex-Confederate heroes who despised wimpy, inept Yankee slave liberators (like Patrick Wayne) in The Searchers-- almost as if the film was a Western sequel to the mythology of Birth of a Nation.   At one point in the movie, John Wayne (Ethan) even declares that, "the only oath (he) ever took was to the Confederate States of America."

     That was, obviously, the prevailing Dunner School mythology of Civil War and Reconstruction era history-- that all Yankee Yellow Legs were inept, cowardly Carpet Baggers, and Confederate renegades like Ethan and the outlaw Josey Wales were rugged American heroes.  (Part of the old myth that the Civil War wasn't really about slavery.)

     From what I've read, Joseph McBride is a national authority on The Searchers, so I'll defer to his opinion on the subject.

It's like Francois Truffaut said: at the end of The Searchers, when Wayne carries Natalie Wood home instead of killing her as he vowed to, you forgive him everything.  Though I think Wayne was smart enough to anticipate that.

[Joseph McBride]

I disagree about THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. I believe it's a masterpiece,

one of Ford's greatest films, and a somber elegy for the men left behind

in our nation's worst defeat up until that time. The theme is the sacrifice

required by war; it's an unusally honest and grim World War II movie from that period

and highly poetic in its approach. The man the Robert Montgomery

character is based on, Rear Admiral (later Vice Admiral) John Bulkeley, who won

the Medal of Honor for rescuing General MacArthur from the Philippines

and for his other exploits as PT boat commander, told me for my biography SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD about

the futile campaign in the Philippines, "I was very bitter about the thing. We went over

there with 111 men and only 9 men came back alive. [The War Department] put eighty

thousand soldiers over there, and that was a political decision on the part of the

president and [Secretary of War Henry L.] Stimson that were going to going

to show the Asiatic race that we supported them, that we did not back off from the

Japanese. But the war plan was totally, utterly hopeless. You could not send a battle

fleet out there and defeat the Japs and bring aid and so forth to the Philippines.

We were not only too far away, we weren't ready. To try to defend the Philippines was

stupid, we couldn't do it. But we had to put up a fight." Montgomery

was assigned to Bulkeley as a lieutenant commander on his PT boat

after the Normandy Invasion (Ford, who had filmed the D-Day landings, also spent time on that boat in

that period to study Bulkeley, and Bulkeley suspected Ford also arranged for Montgomery

to serve on his boat to study him). Bulkeley said, "If you look at that movie carefully and me when

I was much younger, Montgomery and I look alike. Furthermore, our habits

and the way we work, the way we lead, we're very close together. Ford got

someone who could copy my mannerisms and my speech. Good performance

by Montgomery." When I told Bulkeley that I thought EXPENDABLE, while

beautifully photographed with expressionistic lighting by Joseph H. August,

also looks like a documentary, Bulkeley said, "A documentary, yes, but with good actors."

Montgomery directed two weeks of the film at Ford's request

after Ford broke his leg during filming. One of the men under Bulkeley's PT boat command in

the Pacific was Lt. (jg) John F. Kennedy. Bulkeley revealed to me that he recruited JFK into the PT boat service at the personal request of Ambassador

Joseph P. Kennedy, who, Bulkeley recalled, "wanted Jack to get into PT boats for

the publicity and so forth, to get the veterans' vote after the war." The hagiographic New Yorker

article by John Hersey Joe commissioned on JFK's war service was reprinted by the Kennedy

1946 congressional campaign and became a staple of all his later campaigns as well.

My job as a JFK volunteer in the 1960 Wisconsin presidential campaign was

to distribute copies of those articles door-to-door, doing my bit to further the myth

before I knew the facts about those events better.

[Joe Bauer]

Jim, many other top draw actors of that day ( Stewart, Gable, Fonda, etc ) were in the primes of their careers and yet they still joined to serve.

No big movie studio threatened to sue them if they joined. I just can't buy that Wayne excuse as true.

Ronnie Reagan "kind of" served. He was 30 years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

On April 18, 1942, Reagan was ordered to active duty for the first time. Due to his poor eyesight, he was classified for limited service only, which excluded him from serving overseas.^[37] His first assignment was at the San Francisco Port of Embarkation at Fort Mason, California, as a liaison officer of the Port and Transportation Office.^[38] Upon the approval of the Army Air Forces (AAF), he applied for a transfer from the cavalry to the AAF on May 15, 1942, and was assigned to AAF Public Relations and subsequently to the First Motion Picture Unit (officially, the 18th AAF Base Unit) in Culver City, California.^[38] On January 14, 1943, he was promoted to first lieutenant and was sent to the Provisional Task Force Show Unit of This Is the Army at Burbank, California.^[38] He returned to the First Motion Picture Unit after completing this duty and was promoted to captain on July 22, 1943.^[39]

In January 1944, Reagan was ordered to temporary duty in New York City to participate in the opening of the Sixth War Loan Drive, which campaigned for the purchase of war bonds. He was reassigned to the First Motion Picture Unit on November 14, 1944, where he remained until the end of World War II.^[39] By the end of the war, his units had produced some 400 training films for the Air Force, including cockpit simulations for B-29 crews scheduled to bomb Japan. He was separated from active duty on December 9, 1945, as an Army captain.

 

[David Andrews]

I disagree about THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. I believe it's a masterpiece,

one of Ford's greatest films, and a somber elegy for the men left behind

in our nation's worst defeat up until that time.

 

I hear you, Joseph, but the thing's unwatchable.  Not even a decent love story to it.  If it had been playing at the Texas Theater, Oswald would have escaped in all the boredom.

I honestly prefer a put-up job like The Wings of Eagles, which is at least enlivened by Maureen O'Hara and by Ford's hero worship of Spig Wead.  It's a vanity project, but it doesn't stagger under its self-importance like Expendable.

Expendable is too somber by far.  I understand a war was involved, and that Pappy saw some of it.  But real war isn't like that movie.  Good propaganda isn't like Expendable, either.  It's more like Allan Dwan's The Sands of Iwo Jima.   There's a reason that the latter picture endures.

Edited February 19, 2020 by David Andrews