Was John Wayne a Better Actor than Marlon Brando? One Brilliant Movie Historian Thinks so

By N.S.

(I never write the name, “Marlon Brando,” but I made an exception here for Duckduckgo, since most people aren’t aware of what “The Bum” refers to. I didn’t do that with google in mind, because the world’s biggest and most fraudulent search engine automatically buries all of my new entries, where no one will find them.)

John Wayne was, and remains, the world’s most underrated movie star. As his late son, Mike said, movie critics didn’t review his old man’s movies, they reviewed his politics. They also reviewed his fan base. As President Trump would say generations later, “They hate me, because they hate you.”

On the other hand, the critics loved The Bum. The Bum was the world’s most talented movie actor, but he soon squandered his talents. T.B.’s fame and fortune both derived entirely from being a movie star, and yet he had contempt for acting, and wanted to be a political activist, even though people were only interested in his activism, because he was such a big movie star. He embraced the p.c. cause of the week—Jews, then blacks, then American Indians. He made stupid, bombastic statements on behalf of his pets, made terrible choices in movie roles, and refused to learn his lines. Directors’ assistants would have to print out scraps of dialogue, and leave them all over a scene—all over the desk of Don Corleone, in The Godfather (1972); on the diaper of the baby Superman in a scene from Superman: The Movie (1978). He would humiliate directors in front of their crews. He became the anti-actor.

John Wayne was the opposite. Wayne was always looking to learn and improve. Although the aging Wayne also made some atrocious choices of scripts, he also gave some towering performances (The Cowboys, 1972, and in his swan song, The Shootist, 1976).

And of course, Wayne had given many brilliant performances earlier in his career—Red River, Fort Apache, and Three Godfathers (all in 1948); The Quiet Man (1952); The Wings of Eagles (1957); Rio Bravo and The Horse Soldiers (both in 1959); The Alamo (1960); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); El Dorado (1967); and True Grit (1969). And maybe more, since I have yet to see some of his most celebrated performances, e.g., in Hondo (1953) and The High and the Mighty (1954).

But Wayne’s most famous—some would say infamous—performance was in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).

The Searchers is a meditation on murderous racism, honor killings, and on the redemptive power of love. And it’s based on a true incident.

In 1836, a band of Commanches gang-raped and slaughtered the Parker family, settlers living near Fort Parker, Texas, and kidnapped their little girl, Cynthia Ann.

Relatives spent a generation hunting for Cynthia Ann, but the Commanches kept moving and hiding their prize little White girl. (The Pretend Encyclopedia has misrepresented what the Commanche did to Cynthia Ann Parker as having “adopted her.”)

At first, the Comanche children abused and bullied Cynthia Ann, but she proved hardier than them. Eventually, Peta Nocona, the son of the chief who’d kidnapped her took a shine to her, and made her his squaw. They had a son named Quanah, who eventually became chief, as per dynastic right. Quanah so revered his mother that he took her name, calling himself Quanah Parker.

The picture was based on Alan LeMay’s eponymous novel, in which the Wayne character was named Amos Edwards. For the movie, John Ford had screenwriter Frank S. Nugent write a character not in the book, that of the Rev. Capt. Samuel Johnston Clayton, Texas Rangers, for one of Ford’s surrogate sons, the brilliant actor Ward Bond. Bond has great scenes with talk, and great ones without talk.

Talk: After the Comanches have surrounded Clayton’s party, Edwards says, “Well, Reverend, looks like you’ve gotten yourself surrounded.”

Clayton: “Yeah, and I plan on getting me unsurrounded!”

Clayton: “Ethan matches a lot of descriptions….

“Ethan, I gotta ask you and Martin to take a ride to State Capital.”

Ethan: “Is this an invite to a necktie party, Reverend?”

No talk: Just before the search party under the direction of Clayton leaves the Parker house, Clayton has a cup of coffee in one hand, and a fresh-fried donut in the other. Ethan’s sister-in-law brings out his Confederate Army officer’s coat, which she’s brushed off for him. He bends over and kisses her forehead, revealing one of the picture’s crucial subtexts: Ethan and his sister-in-law had been lovers, whose passion has never abated.

The late Andrew Sarris, may he rest in peace, wrote the ultimate analysis of this scene in The American Cinema (1968):

“Bond is drinking some coffee in a standing-up position before going out to hunt some Comanches. He glances toward one of the bedrooms, and notices the woman of the house tenderly caressing the Army uniform of her husband’s brother. Ford cuts back to a full-faced shot of Bond drinking his coffee. Nothing on earth would ever force this man to reveal what he had seen.”

Bond should have been up for Best Supporting Actor, along with Jeffrey Hunter, with Wayne up for Best Actor, Ford for Best Director, heck, the picture was by far the best picture of the year and should have been nominated for at least nine statuettes, but was up for nothing. I believe that was Hollywood’s reaction to Ford having sucker punched Henry Fonda while making Mister Roberts the previous year, which got Ford fired from the picture. (Ford was officially replaced by Mervyn LeRoy, and Warner Brothers put out the cover story that Ford’s gall bladder operation had necessitated his replacement. The official credits say that Roberts was directed by Ford and LeRoy, but it actually had four different directors: Ford, LeRoy, Joshua Logan and Ward Bond.)

Movies like The Searchers could not be brutally frank. Not only would that have caused them to run afoul of the censors, but it would have revolted so many theatergoers so as to turn a box office hit into a bomb. And The Searchers was a huge hit with the public, if not the critics.

When the search party finds the butchered, gang-raped body of the elder Parker girl, Lucy, Ford does not let us see her. Instead, Ethan wraps her in his Confederate Army officer’s coat. The boy next door, Brad Jorgensen, to whom Lucy was betrothed, asks Ethan, “Was she...?,” to which Ethan shouts, “What do you think! Don’t ever ask me! So long as you live, don’t ever ask me again!”

Brad is so shaken that he runs toward the Comanches, and lets them shoot him dead.

Ethan’s bone-deep hatred of the Comanche was born when they gang-raped and slaughtered his own mother.

Because the Comanche have polluted Debbie, as Comanche chief Scar’s squaw, Ethan is hunting for Debbie, in order to commit an honor killing and wiped her out. However, as he told one of his biographers, Michael Munn, when he picked her up and looked into her eyes, he saw his own daughter, and had to relent.

Eventually in 1860, Texas Rangers and federal troops tracked down Cynthia Ann Parker (1827-1871) and rescued her and her infant daughter from the Comanches. However, she didn’t want to be rescued. Twenty-four years of captivity had destroyed her identity. She could no longer speak English, and didn’t want to live apart from her children (she also had two older sons). It is a measure of the spread of the cancer of racial socialism that the Website Humanities Texas describes the situation thusly:

“In 1860, however, Texas Rangers and federal soldiers abducted her, with her infant daughter, in an attack on a Comanche encampment in north Texas.”

How can you “abduct” someone who is living with people who had abducted her?

In Scott Eyman’s monumental biography, John Wayne: The Life and Legend (2014), he writes,

“The Searchers is Wayne’s greatest acting achievement. If Brando’s triumphs were the external life of Stanley Kowalski and the internal lives of Terry Malloy and Vito Corleone, then Wayne combines all of them into Ethan Edwards. The sheer size of the part, and Wayne’s portrayal of it, also signaled a quantum change in his screen dynamic. Ethan Edwards is so implacable and menacing that he’s too large for any genre but the western at its most mythical.”