Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero

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Description

John Ford and John Wayne, two titans of classic film, made one of the most most enduring movies of all time. The genre they defined—the Western—and the heroic archetype they built still matter today.
 
For more than twenty years John Ford and John Wayne were a blockbuster Hollywood team, turning out the various finest Western films ever made. Ford, known for his black eye patch and for his hard-drinking, brawling masculinity, used to be a son of Irish immigrants and used to be renowned as a director for both his craftsmanship and his brutality. John “Duke” Wayne used to be a mere stagehand and bit player in “B” Westerns, but he used to be strapping and handsome, and Ford saw his potential. In 1939 Ford made Wayne a star in Stagecoach, and from there the two men established a close, ceaselessly turbulent relationship.
     Their most productive years saw the release of one iconic film after another: Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But by 1960 the bond of their friendship had frayed, and Wayne felt he could move beyond his mentor with his first solo project, The Alamo. Few of Wayne’s subsequent films would have the brilliance or the cachet of a John Ford Western, but viewed together the careers of these two men changed moviemaking in ways that endure to at the present time. Regardless of the decline of the Western in latest cinema, its cultural legacy, particularly the kind of hero codified by Ford and Wayne—tough, self-reliant, and unafraid to fight but also honorable, trustworthy, and kind—resonates in the whole thing from Star Wars to today’s superhero franchises.
     Drawing on in the past untapped caches of letters and personal documents, Nancy Schoenberger dramatically narrates a complicated, poignant, and iconic friendship and the lasting legacy of that friendship on American culture.

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