Ridden Hard, Put Away Wet
I watched an interesting video called “Big Jake,” starring an older John Wayne and an interesting cast, including Richard Boone, John Wayne’s son Patrick, Robert Mitchum’s son, and a bunch of faces that you grew up with at the movies in the 40s and 50s. Here are those faces again, in about 1973, with sagging eyes and stomachs but also a charm that just captivates me.
I’ve always really liked John Wayne. I think he was adorable as a young, tall, lanky cowboy cranking out lots of poverty-row B westerns for nearly 10 years, and he’s just charming in every one of them. You can see what’s coming.
After he was discovered, when he was already getting on in years, he came into his own and had 10 or 15 years of being a top romantic star, playing opposite people like Marlene Dietrich in her heyday and, of course, having affairs with all of his leading ladies.
Now here he is in “Big Jake,” an old man looking for his kidnapped grandson, and he’s got this crew of people going with him. It takes place in 1909, with the last gasps of the old west getting all mixed up with the beginnings of the 20th century, and you begin seeing cars in the westerns, which is so amusing. This movie has a nice script, and it’s interesting to see John Wayne playing the father of his real-life son and of Mitchum’s son.
Listening to the banter between them, I think, “These people knew how to have a good time, and this must have been a fun movie to make, so late in John Wayne’s career and with these other guys’ careers just beginning, and then surrounded by all these other old timers.
You can see the wisdom that has come into the old guys’ faces and the irony in their acting that wasn’t there 20 or 30 before. You can see that a lot of them had lived really hard lives, but that they had aged pretty well and looked as if they had enjoyed life and lived it to the fullest -- ridden hard and put away wet, maybe, but they enjoyed it.
That’s what I love to see on the faces and in the eyes of these people who the world says really blew it or lost it. That’s not what I see. I see people who had as good a time as they possibly could, which meant that there was a lot of bad to go with it, but they seem to be balanced. You want a lot of joy in your life? OK, the trade-off is that there’s going to be a lot of shit in your life. If you just plod through life in the mediocre middle of the road, maybe you haven’t had a lot of intense pain, but you probably haven’t had a lot of intense joy, either. You’re just not capable of feeling with one very intensely, you lucky sons of bitches!
I’ve always really liked John Wayne. I think he was adorable as a young, tall, lanky cowboy cranking out lots of poverty-row B westerns for nearly 10 years, and he’s just charming in every one of them. You can see what’s coming.
After he was discovered, when he was already getting on in years, he came into his own and had 10 or 15 years of being a top romantic star, playing opposite people like Marlene Dietrich in her heyday and, of course, having affairs with all of his leading ladies.
Now here he is in “Big Jake,” an old man looking for his kidnapped grandson, and he’s got this crew of people going with him. It takes place in 1909, with the last gasps of the old west getting all mixed up with the beginnings of the 20th century, and you begin seeing cars in the westerns, which is so amusing. This movie has a nice script, and it’s interesting to see John Wayne playing the father of his real-life son and of Mitchum’s son.
Listening to the banter between them, I think, “These people knew how to have a good time, and this must have been a fun movie to make, so late in John Wayne’s career and with these other guys’ careers just beginning, and then surrounded by all these other old timers.
You can see the wisdom that has come into the old guys’ faces and the irony in their acting that wasn’t there 20 or 30 before. You can see that a lot of them had lived really hard lives, but that they had aged pretty well and looked as if they had enjoyed life and lived it to the fullest -- ridden hard and put away wet, maybe, but they enjoyed it.
That’s what I love to see on the faces and in the eyes of these people who the world says really blew it or lost it. That’s not what I see. I see people who had as good a time as they possibly could, which meant that there was a lot of bad to go with it, but they seem to be balanced. You want a lot of joy in your life? OK, the trade-off is that there’s going to be a lot of shit in your life. If you just plod through life in the mediocre middle of the road, maybe you haven’t had a lot of intense pain, but you probably haven’t had a lot of intense joy, either. You’re just not capable of feeling with one very intensely, you lucky sons of bitches!
posted by Old Timer at 9:55 AM
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