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John Wayne is, in the words of Joseph Campbell, a "hero with a thousand faces."1 This remarkable actor accomplished, through his long career in the movies, an achievement that cannot be matched by any other in the art form. He has spoken to countless numbers of people in cinema audiences around the world; he has articulated a mythic adventure with universal appeal. I use the word "faces" with figurative intent, since Wayne kept his single, impressive appearance throughout his career; his amble remained the same, his bulk was steady though increasingly greater, and his face kept its prominent features fixed upon audiences everywhere.
From role to role John Wayne took his continuing image, building and growing as he changed "faces" to create, finally, a monomyth of the hero who moves from alienation through trial to victory and return. John Wayne's continuing character between films accumulated force of identity through changing roles in the films; the myth of John Wayne is larger than any single role in any single film, though within single films he enacted roles that varied the myth occasionally. As a whole, out of time, the films of Wayne compose not only a'canon of accomplishment, but they also compose themselves into a mythic pattern that marks them (and his career) as the matter of folklore and folk art. This pattern is one which has been described by several different critics of art and culture, but none more usefully than by Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye.2
The appearance of the "star" as an image of film vision is, on an aesthetic level, an experience of the essence incarnated. Successive appearances are successive- reincarnations, transfigurations of the archetypal figure. Like the divine heroes of old, popular movie stars move through myth-making adventures which fulfill ancient patterns of human fears and human desires. Although he is not the only such star to make up the form of the monomyth, John Wayne may be the most obvious and the most universal (i.e. trans-cultural) of them all. He becomes the hero of comedy, romance, irony, and tragedy, whenever he descends to make his presence known. A success in one role may be noteworthy or not, but the real force of his performance derives from the repetition of his...