Three movies w/ J.W. last night on grit tv channel.
Sagebrush trail, Blue steel and west of the divide.

All three looked as though the went out and shot footage w/o the audio guy,
then went back ( in studio) to over dub the script in a phone booth,
then! they went to the foly guy for the horse hooves gun shots and glass breaking.
then !
and all of the music was the same sound track , more or less

Had never seen these before , too terrible to watch

A classic

Here is a clip of the stunts in the picture:

"B" Westerns produced by studios with little budget during the Depression, and the World War II years are a genre of their own. I own a DVD set of about 100 of them (some are decent shape, others not so much). JW did his own stuntwork in many of them, tried his hand at being a singing cowboy in another. These films also gave us Bob Steele, Tom Tyler, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers, many others before they got a break with good studios.

John Wayne did a bunch of those B westerns in the 1930's. Sure, they're pretty generic with the same plots, same background footage, etc. Depression era Saturday afternoon at the movies for some fun and escapism.

His first scene in Stagecoach, the closeup of his face while waiting for the approaching stagecoach, made him a star.

yeah after going through the great depression , I suppose that they were considered to be fabulous

Duke Wayne spent his time on film's Poverty Row before John Ford made him a star. All those early Westerns he made before 1939- with one exception- were intended for the Saturday matinee kiddie crowd.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
...with one exception-

My guess is this one, Wayne's very first starring role. I don't remember ever seeing a 70mm widescreen film from this early age. And 3 hours long



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fVXWUIcvHc

JW did a lot of 'contract acting' early on. You do what you do to pay the bills.

True fact, John Wayne did a cameo on the Beverly Hillbillies episode 'The Indians are Coming'. At this time he was wealthy enough that if you drank bourbon on his yacht then he iced the pour with chips of alaskan glacier ice. When the producers of BH asked JW for his desired payment he replied 'Give me a fithh of bourbon, that'll square it". I used that as a sig line for a while.

Also, JW was buried in an unmarked grave for twenty years. It was feared that anti-war protesters would vandalize his grave. The epitaph has been extracted from his Playboy interview.

The movie Green Berets features an exposition by Mr. Wayne that if GDCs take over Vietnam then the GDCs will kill every person of educated status. At the time this was ridiculed but events in VN, and Cambodia proved him right.