“I was just the paint for the palettes of Ford and Hawks.”

– John Wayne –

John Wayne was still young in 1944, only thirty-eight years old. And yet the major elements of his inimitable style were hardening into place. Perhaps no other actor in history has been so cognizant of using his body to express grand themes and timeless mythological underpinnings. Under Ford’s direction Wayne never just stands there, he poses, in ways and with effects that conjure up famous paintings and sculpture. When he fills the frame as Lieutenant Junior Grade Rusty Ryan in They Were Expendable, he becomes every man who ever fought a losing action in a war, who faced defeat with stoicism, who sacrificed for a greater good. In the history of film, John Wayne remains nonpareil in his use of presence to project subtext.

Little of that came naturally to the Duke — in his early films he’s tall and rangy and handsome, but with little of the gravity, focus, and dramatic weight that would come to typify his prime acting years. Those skills, and they were skills, were consciously learned over fifteen years of working with Ford and his old troupe of veteran actors. He watched the way they walked and carried themselves, studied the way they were directed, and began to divine the level of nuance Ford demanded. There’s a funny story from the making of Stagecoach (1939, John Wayne’s big coming-out party as an actor), where Wayne’s character was supposed to be washing his face after a hard day, and Ford started smacking him around screaming, “Christ Duke, wash you face like a man! You’re daubing it! You’re daubing it!” He was trying to teach Wayne that, when you are an actor in front of a camera, your every movement can and should mean something deeper than what is on the surface. The act of washing one’s face can be pedestrian, or it can be a sweeping gesture that evokes strength of character, or a relaxed demeanor, or a gentleness of heart. And those deft movements will unconsciously fire off all sorts of neurons in the brain of an audience.

When you watch They Were Expendable, pay close attention to John Wayne. Look how he stands in each shot compared to others in the frame, how he inevitably comes across as more interesting than everyone else, more classically posed. Notice the way his hands are often planted on his hips, his elbows flared wide. The way his chest is thrust out like a peacock. The way he keeps his face turned down and glares out at people from under dark eyebrows. The way he wrinkles his forehead with weariness and, without blinking, gazes out into space with a thousand-yard stare that looks as if he has all the pain of the war bottled within. Other, supposedly more accomplished actors would go toe-to-toe with Duke in a scene, and he would often just mop the floor with them, blowing them off the screen with a look or a gesture.

To this day, leftists regularly embarrass themselves with the argument that the Duke’s lack of a war record disqualifies him from being an on-screen exemplar of cherished American values. The notion that an actor must actually be in real life whatever he’s portraying on screen is idiotic. Wayne was never a real-life war hero, granted. But neither was he the draft-dodging hypocrite of liberal fever-swamp fantasies. A May 1942 letter exists of Wayne almost begging John Ford to pull strings to get him into his Field Photo unit:

Have you any suggestions on how I should get in? Can I get assigned to your outfit, and if I could, would you want me? How about the Marines? You have Army and Navy men under you. Have you any Marines or how about a Seabee or what would you suggest or would you? No, I’m not drunk. I just hate to ask favors, but for Christ sake you can suggest, can’t you?. . .No kidding, coach, who’ll I see?

Meanwhile Herbert Yates, the head of Republic Pictures, continually requested deferments for Wayne in a desperate effort to keep his main action star on the lot. Studios like M-G-M could let a dozen headliners go off to fight and still have a vast stable of bankable names to draw on. A tiny second-rate outfit like Republic, on the other hand, had none to spare. Yates’ biggest moneymaker, Gene Autry, had already abandoned his contract to enlist, meaning that in 1942 and 1943 the only Republic films to become Top Twenty box-office hits starred John Wayne.

One review from the period noted, “John Wayne is a rudimentary actor, but he has the look and bearing, unusual for his trade, of a capable human male. . . he is able to make his habitual inarticulateness suggest the uncommunicative competence that men expect in their leaders.” At a time when President Roosevelt was making patriotic films a top priority (wartime theater attendance had skyrocketed from fifty million people a week to more than ninety million), Wayne was one of the only guys left in Hollywood able to pull them off and make them hits (Humphrey Bogart being another).

“You should have thought about all that before you signed a new contract!” Yates said when Wayne asked to be allowed to enlist. “If you don’t live up to it, I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got! I’ll sue you for every penny you hope to make in the future!” For the Duke — who grew up poor and ever worried about returning to those circumstances — it was a terrifying threat. He was not yet a star on the level of a Gable or Stewart or Fonda (or even a Robert Montgomery, who in 1945 got paid $170,000 for They Were Expendable compared to Wayne’s $80.000). John Ford’s grandson Dan, a veteran in his own right, later mused that

It must have weighed heavily on him which way to go. But here was his chance and he knew it. He was an action leading man, and there were a lot of roles for him to play. There was a lot of work in A movies, and this was a guy who had made eighty B movies. He had finally moved up to the first rank. He was in the right spot at the right time with the right qualities and willing to work hard. Would I have done any different? The answer is hell no.

Soon, Yates was making money with Wayne not only by starring him in Republic films, but by loaning him out to other studios, all of whom were suffering from their own leading man shortages. Wayne worked relentlessly, averaging four movies a year. At the behest of Mary Ford, he would come to the Hollywood Canteen after hours and wash dishes, bus tables, and carve turkeys. Between films in late 1943, he embarked on a three-month, two-shows-a-day USO tour across the South Pacific. The experience made a deep impression on him. “They’ll build stages out of old crates,” he reverently noted after one trip, “then sit in mud and rain for three hours waiting for someone like me to say ‘Hello, Joe’.”

The war ending without his having enlisted would haunt Wayne’s conscience for the rest of his life. In hindsight, a large part of his later career can be seen as a sincere effort to make amends by doing our troops proud via the art of filmmaking.

John Ford’s disgust with Wayne’s lack of military experience has been grossly over-exaggerated, but he did add it to his tool chest of things used to get a rise out of his protégé or, in extreme cases, bring him to tears. During the filming of They Were Expendable, after several takes of Robert Montgomery and Wayne saluting a departing general, Ford broke out with, “Duke — can’t you manage a salute that at least looks as though you’ve been in the service?” Crestfallen and shattered, Wayne walked off of a set for the only time in his life. Montgomery, who served with distinction throughout the war, walked up to Ford, put his hands on the arms of the director’s chair, and with steel in his voice said, “Don’t you ever speak to anyone like that again.” When he further insisted that Ford find Wayne and apologize, Montgomery remembers that, “[Ford] blustered at first — ‘I’m not going to apologize to that son of a bitch. . .’; then he came out with a lot of phony excuses — ‘What did I say? I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings.’ He ended up crying.”

But if the grizzled director sometimes drove the Duke to fits of despair, he far more often elevated him to the heights of cinema legend. Few anecdotes illustrate this more profoundly than the tale behind the nostalgic tune featured so memorably in They Were Expendable, “Marchéta.” Pronounced Mar-KEE-ta, it’s a 1913 “love song of Old Mexico” written by the American composer Victor Schertzinger when he was but 25 years old. Some thirty years after the song became a well-loved standard, Ford made “Marchéta” one of the emotional linchpins of his 1945 film.

All the versions of “Marchéta” to be found on modern CDs are either overwrought ballads by male vocalists like Al Jolson and Mario Lanza, or else corny “cha-cha” dance instrumentals. However, when played in sleepy waltz-time it becomes an achingly beautiful theme. It is first played (and the lyrics quietly sung by the assembled crowd) when Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) attends a hospital dance on Corregidor, in the Philippines, and falls in love with a nurse there. Much later in the movie Bataan falls, and Corregidor (where his lover is stationed) is being bombed and starved into submission by the Japanese. As Wayne gets drunk in an island bar, a poignant reprise of the melody appears on the radio. Without a single word of dialogue or explanation, Wayne gazes off into space, and as the music plays we recognize it from before, and realize he is remembering that wonderful evening spent dancing in the darkness with a doomed woman he’ll never see again:

–

The song is utilized expertly in Expendable, and would stick with John Wayne for the rest of his life. Ford, you see, had an accordionist friend named Danny Borzage, who would often play mood music to help the actors find the right emotional timbre for a scene. (In fact, Borzage can be seen on-screen in many of Ford’s films — in They Were Expendable, look for him under the floorboards of a hut providing musical accompaniment to Ward Bond’s serenade of Donna Reed.) Whenever John Ford or a member of his stock company appeared on-set for the day’s work, Borzage would also play favored themes — different for each person — to announce their arrival. Over time, his presence and these songs became a grand and well-loved tradition on Ford’s sets, creating a palpable sense of family amongst the cast and crew.

After They Were Expendable, “Marchéta” became John Wayne’s aural signature, lovingly warbled on Danny Borzage’s accordion each morning to herald the arrival of the Duke. It’s a beautiful melody, laden with nostalgia, and deserves to be remembered far better than it has been.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we focus on some of the other members of the John Ford Stock Company who appeared in They Were Expendable, along with a pair of prominent non-Fordian actors who helped greatly to make the movie special.

PAST POSTS IN THIS SERIES

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

Here’s a great review/essay on They Were Expendable by an anonymous writer at eOpinions, one that adds more arguments and behind-the-scenes stories to my defense of John Wayne’s actions during the war.

The National Archives has some scans online of pages from John Wayne’s 1943 application for a commission with the OSS (scroll to bottom of page).

A kindly pianist saw fit to post a nice, full version of “Marchéta” on the Internet for all to enjoy, one that hews pretty closely to the way it sounds in They Were Expendable. I find most of the other versions lacking (Al Jolson does the best lyrical interpretation, in my opinion), but there’s a lot more examples out there on YouTube if you want to explore them.

MOVIE TRIVIA TIME: It’s a little-known fact that film director Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther series, et al.) started out in Hollywood as a young actor, with one of his earliest roles being an uncredited sailor in They Were Expendable. If you look carefully, he can be seen in both the “Marchéta” video above and in the Introductory video to Part 1 of this series. Care to guess which sailor is Edwards?  Put your choices in the Comments section below, and I’ll reveal the answer in next week’s installment.

“That bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes.”

– General Douglas MacArthur, describing his savior John Bulkeley –

In March 1942, facing imminent capture by the Japanese, America’s commander in the Far East was ordered to slip away to safety in Australia. The Empire of the Sun controlled both air and sea, and only a precious few Allied planes and ships remained in-theater, skulking through the night fog like pirates to avoid capture and running on little more than spit and baling wire. “Overhauling those motors without any replacement parts was a terrible job,” one of the few to escape that nightmare later remembered. “For instance. Any tank-town garage which overhauls a flivver back in the States always replaces the gaskets with new ones. Only we didn’t have any. Or any sealing compound. So those old gaskets had to be carefully removed, handled as gently as though they were precious lace, and laid back in place when the motors were reassembled.”

When MacArthur arrived at the dock with his family and key commanders, he found waiting for him a trio of tiny, dilapidated motor torpedo boats crewed by dirty, emaciated men with long, unkempt beards and wild eyes. Their skipper was a thirty-year-old U.S. Navy Lieutenant named John Bulkeley, who for months had held his disintegrating squadron together by scrounging like a rat among the islands for gasoline, torpedoes, and other basic supplies. His boats were little more than plywood matchboxes, but Bulkeley had kept them active long after the rest of America’s Navy and Air Force had been destroyed or driven off. He made sneak assaults against transports, cruisers, destroyers, airplanes, landing parties — anything to frustrate the pace of the overwhelming Japanese invasion. Every time he attacked it was a fearsome David-versus-Goliath mismatch, but Bulkeley had done so time and again, sinking many enemy vessels.

Now he faced his most important task yet: use his last sputtering, wheezing boats to ferret precious human cargo across enemy-infested waters to the southern island of Mindanao, where MacArthur and his contingent could then be safely flown to Melbourne. To do this, he rocketed his boats across hundreds of miles under cover of night, navigating in the impenetrable darkness by instinct alone while deftly avoiding Japanese patrols. It was a spectacular feat of derring-do. As MacArthur told him when he disembarked several days later, waterlogged and exhausted but safe to fight another day: “You have taken me out of the jaws of death. I shall never forget it.”

For all of this, Bulkeley was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and received the Medal of Honor. His citation reads:

For extraordinary heroism, distinguished service, and conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty as commander of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3, in Philippine waters during the period 7 December 1941 to 10 April 1942. The remarkable achievement of LCDR Bulkeley’s command in damaging or destroying a notable number of Japanese enemy planes, surface combatant and merchant ships, and in dispersing landing parties and land-based enemy forces during the 4 months and 8 days of operation without benefit of repairs, overhaul, or maintenance facilities for his squadron, is believed to be without precedent in this type of warfare. His dynamic forcefulness and daring in offensive action, his brilliantly planned and skillfully executed attacks, supplemented by a unique resourcefulness and ingenuity, characterize him as an outstanding leader of men and a gallant and intrepid seaman. These qualities coupled with a complete disregard for his own personal safety reflect great credit upon him and the Naval Service.

These exploits provided the basis for W. L. White’s 1942 bestseller They Were Expendable. It is a story of heroism, but a particularly grim one. Bulkeley remembered later that he “was very bitter about the thing. We went over there with 111 men and only 9 men came back alive. . . the war plan was totally, utterly hopeless. . . But we had to put up a fight.” An Admiral in John Ford’s 1945 film version of the story explains the brutal rationale for allowing so many Americans to be defeated and captured: “Pearl Harbor was a disaster, like the Spanish Armada. Listen, son — you and I are professionals. If the manager says, ‘Sacrifice,’ we lay down a bunt, and let somebody else hit the home runs.”

The book itself is still a fine read, filled with hard-nosed, first-person reportage and telling anecdotes. Some choice quotes:

“They were burying the dead — which consisted of collecting heads and arms and legs and putting them into the nearest bomb crater and shoveling debris over it. The smell was terrible. The Filipino yard workers didn’t have much stomach for the job, but it had to be done and done quick because of disease. To make them work, they filled the Filipinos up with grain alcohol. . . those staggering Filipinos, maybe dragging a trunk toward a crater, pulling it by its one remaining leg, or else maybe rolling a head along like on a putting green. The Japs must have killed at least a thousand. . . .”

“It seemed to be a Jap reconnaissance patrol. . . one group stopped and ate chow on the road bank opposite us; we were scared stiff they would come over and find us. It was hard for the wounded to lie quiet. Our tank driver had a rivet stuck in his throat — every time he took a drink, the water would come leaking out. . . .”

“Here in Newport maybe you wouldn’t think it was much of a party. But it was a swell night, with a big moon hanging over Manila Bay — peaceful — and best of all, all the girls had broken out with their civilian dresses. That doesn’t sound like much, but one look at them after seeing nothing but uniforms for months was like a trip back home. Make-up too — they looked so goddamned nice you could eat them with a spoon. . . .”

“How slow everybody learns in a war. Nobody knows anything about a war until it begins. Just two years before, the Polish air force had been blown to hell on the ground. The French caught it the following spring. In spite of that, the same things happened to our planes at Pearl Harbor. And yet two days later, in spite of all of it, the Japs catch our air corps on Luzon with its pants down. Only that wasn’t the end. Months later, on my way out through Australia, I pass a big American field, and there they are, bombers and fighters parked in orderly rows, wing tip to wing tip. ‘Hell,’ they told me, ‘The Japs are hundreds of miles away.’ Except that’s where they’re always supposed to be when they catch you with your pants down, and I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, won’t these guys ever learn?”

“The whole crowd started pulling money out of their pockets and piling it on the table. They’d had no pay since the start of the war, but since they’d been down here in Mindanao, they’d had shore leave and a chance to play poker with the army. The government could cut the cost of the war by just paying the army and then giving the sailors a chance to play poker with them.”

“But here were all these brave people on Bataan and the Rock, Peggy among them, realizing more clearly every day that they would never get out. Doomed, but bracing themselves to look fate in the face as it drew nearer, knowing that they were expendable like ammunition, and that it was part of the war plan that they should sell themselves as dearly as possible before they were killed or captured by the Japs. . .”

You would think that John Ford would have jumped at the chance to make a movie about Bulkeley, but it took several years of cajoling to get him to agree to direct Expendable. Unlike many, he was actually enjoying the war in a perverse way: globetrotting around the world, feeling the exhilaration of being shot at and having bombs dropped on you, and getting rigorous exercise at fifty years of age. He relished being a part of the armed services he had admired for so long, and heading back home to make a movie would take him away from it all, perhaps forever. It could also be the case that Ford needed time to think about the movie, to dwell on how important it was to get right, and to plan exactly what he wanted to focus on.

Bulkeley had already lived through the harrowing events depicted in Expendable — and been one of the lucky few to escape — when between missions he went to Ford’s Washington DC hotel room to say hello. As Bulkeley later admitted to Ford biographer Joseph McBride, his first encounter with his country’s greatest film director was memorable, to say the least:

I went to see him and he was bare-tail, absolutely naked in that damn bed. He loved to do that for shock effect, he had men in there and he had women in there, hangers-on trying to get a job or something, he had a big plate of food, eating with his fingers like a Roman emperor.

The opening statement [from Ford] was, “See that closet?” “Yup.” “Open it up.” I opened it up and there was a captain’s uniform with four stripes. He said, “You see that? I’m a captain.” I said [sarcastically], “Yes. What are you captain of?” He picked up that big plate of food and threw it at me, and I just ran out the door! He didn’t even bother getting out of bed, he just reared up and whammo!

It was a match made in heaven. They eventually bonded during some shared days aboard ship during the D-Day invasion, and in October 1944, with the war heavily in our favor and civilian life staring him in the face once again, John Ford changed his status to inactive and went to film the movie while his war experiences (and his impressions of Bulkeley) were all still fresh in his mind.

As for Bulkeley himself, he continued serving in the Navy in various capacities for the rest of his life, eventually rising to the rank of Vice Admiral. Among his chestful of awards were the Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, two Distinguished Service Crosses, two Distinguished Service Medals, and two Legion of Merit Awards.

On April 6, 1996, John Duncan Bulkeley died at the age of 84, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington. All told, the “bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes” had served his country faithfully for some fifty-five years. In June of 2000, a new Navy destroyer was christened USS Bulkeley. May that ship bring as much honor to the name Bulkeley as Bulkeley brought to his country.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers: a look at They Were Expendable’s luminous cinematography and graceful direction.

Previous posts in the series “John Ford, John Wayne, and They Were Expendable“:

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

An interesting article reprinted from a postwar issue of Mechanix Illustrated, which focuses on how Bulkeley’s beloved PT Boats were made to roar off the assembly line in unprecedented numbers.

A nice piece describing the real-life tale behind the events of They Were Expendable.

Buy the book They Were Expendable at Amazon. Over sixty-five years later, it is still in print and still a valuable, exciting read. Better yet, hunt down an old used copy from the 1940s, where you can see the advertisements for war bonds on the back cover.

Read a little post-Expendable nugget about how Beulah Greenwalt, the real-life nurse brought to fictional life by Donna Reed in the movie, used her noggin and her nerve to protect and preserve the regimental flag of her unit.