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Post by TheGoodMan19 on Mar 25, 2021 14:20:51 GMT
It is hard to evaluate an icon, but several of his roles for John Ford and Howard Hawks seem at least nomination-worthy to me. ... definitely. Wayne's performance in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Ford, 1962) combines strength with subtlety and proves quite intricate, with the Duke achieving genuine pathos. And in The Searchers (Ford, 1956) and Red River (Hawks, 1948), he tests the limits and nature of heroism in ways that are quite daring. But Westerns historically received scarcely little Oscar attention, and Wayne was younger then. By 1969, he was aging, and his role in True Grit proved broadly comedic and thus lovably nonthreatening. One might argue, though, that Wayne was at least as deserving of Academy attention for his performance in The Cowboys (Mark Rydell, 1972) a few years later. In one of the seventies' most memorable Westerns, he blends a more naturalistic form of "grit" with unsentimental vulnerability. The more "ambiguous", for lack of a better word, Wayne's character was in he film, the better the Duke's performance was. Red River, Liberty Valence, Searchers. He never went full out bad, like Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West. If Wayne had, I bet it would have been amazing.
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