Free American Titan: Searching for John Wayne by Marc Eliot

and Arthur Edeson are stunning, and Walsh’s use of natural sound was innovative and exemplary.
    However, the physical strain on machines and humans continued to take its toll. Wayne became seriously ill during filming: “I was three weeks on my back with turistas— or Montezuma’s revenge, or the Aztec two-step, whatever you want to call it. You know, you get a little grease and soap on the inside of a fork and you’ve got it. Anyway, that was the worst case I’ve ever had in my life. I’d been sick for so long that they finally said, ‘Jeez, Duke, if you can’t get up now, we’ve got to get somebody else to take your place.’ So, with a loss of eighteen pounds, I returned to work while I puked and crapped blood for a week.”
    In the end, the biggest problem with the film’s star was not his health but his acting. Wayne’s lack of real-life experience showed in his on-screen lack of authority. Breck Coleman is the key character of the story, a star turn, the one who keeps all the plot strands of the film together. Much of Wayne’s acting comes off overly stiff, with exaggerated hand gestures and facial expressions meant to “show” what he was thinking, instead of illustrating what he was feeling. And when it came to the love scenes with Marguerite Churchill, the uptight Wayne had absolutely no idea how to approach her or them. Some of the other actors giggled at his attempts to be romantic (as audiences would when the film opened). They came off tentative, imitative, and artificial.
    Walsh realized too late that the big difference between John Wayne and Gary Cooper was something all the lessons and lenses in the world couldn’t fix. Cooper sizzled on-screen, a quality that got him through the most ridiculous of scenarios, like Morocco , but Wayne had plainly no heat. He acted at room temperature, and it would keep him from ever becoming a romantic leading man.
    As visualized by Walsh, The Big Trail was a metaphor for the journey of life, with its Chaucer-like multiplicity of stories that emerge from under the one umbrella theme of progress. However, with too many writers to make it a unified whole, and with the limitations imposed by having to shoot in Grandeur, the momentum of the Great American Dream is viewed only from an external viewpoint, too much vista, too little vision.
    The Big Trail premiered November 1, 1930, a noisy, flashing, lavish spectacle of a night, complete with klieg lights rotating in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, followed the next day by awful reviews and after that, mediocre box office. Walsh was, at this point in his career, still directing with an actor’s eye rather than a director’s, and it limited his ability to construct a convincing mise-en-scène .
    Wayne, too, had to share some of the blame. He had not had enough training or experience to carry a major motion picture. His acting was full of exaggerated motions he had learned watching silent film. He didn’t yet know how to do more in front of a camera by doing less, to trust that the camera could look into rather than just at him.
    THE RECRIMINATIONS FROM THE FILM’S failure ran deep. The Big Trail all but ended Marguerite Churchill’s run as a movie star . She never again starred in a major motion picture. It was Tyrone Power Sr.’s only “talkie” and his last film. He died the next year of a heart attack, in his star-to-be son’s arms. After finishing out his contract with Fox, Walsh moved to Paramount and floundered for nearly a decade before he next landed at Warner Bros and found his auteurist soul directing The Roaring Twenties in 1939, with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney as the yin and yang of Depression-era crime.
    The Big Trail was seen in its original intended Grandeur form in only two theaters, the Roxy in New York and Grauman’s in Los Angeles. The rest of the country and the world saw it in standard 35 mm, which is to say they didn’t really see it at all. After the film’s brief run