You’d think that John Wayne said the word ‘pilgrim’ a lot. He did. But only in one movie.

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the Duke said it 25 times. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) counted.

Every celebrity impersonator since Rich Little used the word pilgrim whenever they were imitating John Wayne. That made me think what you likely thought. That Wayne said the word a lot.

When I was a kid, I thought calling someone a pilgrim referred to that group of folks who left England and gave us Thanksgiving. In a way, that’s right. In Liberty Valance, the character Jimmy Stewart played was the one the Duke was calling a pilgrim. A man who’d come west from somewhere back east. So, in that way he was a pilgrim. A man moving somewhere else for a specific reason.

Even though he didn’t use the word pilgrim as much as we all thought, there is one thing that John Wayne was a lot in the movies. He was the good guy. He stood up for what was right. He fought against what was wrong.

As a child, if we played cowboys, we all wanted to be John Wayne. No one ever wanted to be Lee Marvin (the bad guy in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) or Bruce Dern (the bad guy in The Cowboys, and the first guy to kill John Wayne in a movie).

John Wayne always played characters who were like superheroes, except he wasn’t playing Superman or Batman. He was playing a real-life person who had all of the attributes of a superhero. He just didn’t possess the ability to see through walls or leap over tall buildings in a single bound.

I’ve never been too sure what a bound is, but if there ever was a human being who could bound, it would’ve been John Wayne.

If you look at Hollywood stars of the last 100 years, not many of them have anywhere close to the staying power of John Wayne. Fellas who weren’t even born when John Wayne died love The Duke. You’ll still find all kinds of John Wayne merchandise bought and sold at places across the country.

The true litmus test of popularity in my book is whether you’ve been immortalized on black velvet. Next to a rendition of Elvis standing next to Jesus at a truck stop, John Wayne on his horse in a black velvet portrait proves how popular you still are.

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne was such a good guy; he let somebody else take the credit for being the good guy (I won’t reveal too much in case by some odd quirk of fate you’ve never seen the movie). Lee Marvin is excellent as the bad guy, but as I said, no one ever wanted to be Lee Marvin when playing cowboys in the back yard.

Just as John Wayne always seemed to do in his movies, he gave not just young men, but everyone else a lesson on how to be a good person. Truth, justice, and the American way, as they say. Wayne always seemed to be able to pick the movie roles that embodied exactly who and how you were supposed to be.

In The Cowboys, The Duke literally took on a bunch of young fellas (actual boys) and took them on a cattle drive. He showed them how to become men through the toughest way possible – Bruce Dern.

I don’t think there’s ever been a better bad guy in the movies than Bruce Dern. I can remember sitting in the movie theater when The Cowboys came out and hating Bruce Dern’s character’s guts. My mom always told me not to say that I hated someone’s guts, so that’s how I knew that was the strongest thing I could say about disliking someone.

Bruce Dern was such a good actor that I really believed he was that mean of a man. When he killed John Wayne in The Cowboys, I wasn’t the only one who really hated him. Burt Reynolds told the story of he and Dern being chased out of a bar after the movie came out. It seems that a bunch of semi-inebriated rednecks held the same assessment of Dern as I had.

Back to John Wayne.

The other night on the TV channel Grit, Wayne’s final film, The Shootist, came on. I also went to see that one in a theater in 1976. It was appropriate that The Duke portrayed another good guy. Ironically, in this movie, he played a dying man. In real life, Wayne did die just a few years later.

Despite the fact that he was dying, he used his experience as a lifelong gunslinger to help rid the town of the bad guys. Ron Howard played the young man who learned right from wrong, with whom he should be hanging out, and whom he shouldn’t.

As an exit, John Wayne even had a thing or two he could teach Opie Taylor and Richie Cunningham. Proof that The Duke is still a great example for all of us.

Especially us pilgrims.

 

©2024 John Moore

John’s books, Puns for Groan People and Write of Passage: A Southerner’s View of Then and Now Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, are available on his website TheCountryWriter.com, where you can also send him a message.