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Article: John Wayne gave manliness a quiet, endearing swagger.
- Article from:
- The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD)
- Article date:
- May 18, 2007
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 The Baltimore Sun. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Michael Sragow
May 18--In John Wayne's best-loved non-Western, John Ford's 1952 The Quiet Man, he plays a boxer afraid of his own strength because he once killed a man in the ring. He does one of the slowest burns in film history, expressing the splutter with a hitch in his rolling walk and the way he dispatches a butt like a spear to the ground as if to say he finally means business. And his reluctance to be violent makes him likable, even noble.
Look beneath the weathered surface and raucous high jinks of Wayne's trademark Westerns, and even the tortured complexities of Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) and Ford's The Searchers (1956), and you'll ...