JOHN WAYNE......THE DUKE!......Through the years 'THE DUKE' made a couple of hundred films of varying quality it has to be said ,but he was always the good guy ,all American hero and all that and entered the realm of legend for The Good ol U.S.ofA....Living on whisky and moms apple pie.
Apparently when the war broke out some old football injury and the fact that he was in his thirties and getting on a bit to be shot in real life excluded him from being called up for active service which 'broke his heart', personally i'd've been 'over the moon'. So he stayed with fighting and shooting people on the big screen.
This event is thought to be the reason that he became such a staunch republican and Anti -'Pinko commie fag'!....Joseph Stalin ,apparently liked John Waynes films but ordered him to be assassinated. The Yank soldiers still loved him and named items of equipment after him, even the toilet paper , as "It was rough tough and didn't take shit off nobody!" Now that should be on a tombstone.
I liked his classics and his later middleaged elder character going towards the humour of the western. His greatest creation was JOHN WAYNE and he was the character in every western ,same guns and cloths ,the only one where a whole new character was created was TRUE GRIT as the dubiously heroic whisky guzzling one eyed hero ROOSTER COGBURN! Hired by a young girl to track the killers of her father with the help of GLENN CAMPBELL,no less. The great fight at the end with ROOSTER storming down a grassy slope on his horse with a WINCHESTER RIFLE in each hand loading and firing with one hand for each gun , yelling something along the lines of "Fill yer hands you sons of bitches!" A great film ,performance and winner of an academy award ,i think the only one the duke won.
Whereas ,even when JOHN WAYNE was young i never thought of him as young ,just had darker hair and tended to be in black n' white. Whereas JEFF BRIDGES was a wild young thing ,i always remember him being CLINT EASTWOODS wild side kick in 'THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT'. He seemed to dissappear for a while, to return , now a 'more mature' character has emerged playing the old grizzled characters like WILD BILL HICOCK in 'WILD BILL'. a cracker of a film i saw fairly recently and loved it. When they said they were going to remake TRUE GRIT, i thought 'Well why?'....But who am i to question the money grabbing swine over there in HOLLYWOOD.
I bought a pirate copy in a boozer in the fair city of LIVERPOOL. It wasn't too bad until towards the end along the bottom of the screen you could see people going to and from the toilets along the rows of seats as people stood up and down to allow the pain in the arse cinema boozers to get to the bogs....And then to top it off some inconsiderate swine spoiled my enjoyment of my pirate DVD by allowing their mobile phone to ring ,just no consideration some people!
But i did watch the proper version and liked the more grizzled realistic settings and ROOSTER COGBURN, basically the same story and sequence of events, but did JEFF BRIDGES get rolls of cheap military bog paper named after him?I think not,he's an actor, not an American icon I think J.B. is great ,and J.W. is great....J.B is a wonderful actor and great at the tough grizzled character at this time in his career....Whereas J.W. was the great JOHN WAYNE playing the hero of whatever film he was starring in.
Two versions of the same film and i loved them both, JEFF BRIDGES ,'TRUE GRIT' would've been a classic without the shadow of JOHN WAYNE hovering over it, but JOHN WAYNES 'original ' has been a classic for years now after all this time it has competition.
