Every year, the Harris Poll used to ask Americans to name their favorite movie star. In 2016, the last year poll results were announced, John Wayne ranked No. 4—the only actor no longer living who made the top 10. He has done so for as long as Harris has been asking the question, and there is no reason to suppose that he will drop off the list any time soon, for he is one of a bare handful of golden-age film stars whose names and faces are generally known to ordinary Americans under the age of 50. Not only are Wayne’s movies still shown on cable TV and available on streaming services, but his critical standing has risen slowly but surely since his death in 1979. Starting in 1952 and at decade-long intervals thereafter, Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, invited prominent critics to name the 10 greatest films of all time. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), in which Wayne gave what is universally regarded as his greatest performance, ranked No. 5 in 1992 and No. 7 in 2012—the only western to have made any of Sight & Sound’s seven lists.
In his lifetime, though, Gary Cooper was at least as big a star as Wayne. He made the Quigley Publishing Company’s “Top 10 Money Making Stars Poll” of movie-theater owners 18 times between 1936 and 1957, a record bettered only by Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Tom Cruise. Moreover, he was widely thought to be a much better actor than Wayne. Charles Laughton, who knew a thing or two about acting, went so far as to call him “the greatest actor in Hollywood.” And unlike Wayne, who is now remembered exclusively as a western hero who made war movies on the side, Cooper, a dashing clothes horse who was catnip to his female co-stars, was also at home in costume dramas, screwball comedies, and such sophisticated fare as Ernst Lubitsch’s 1933 screen version of Noël Coward’s Design for Living.
Yet Wayne remains a present-tense pop-culture icon, while Cooper is essentially unknown except to film buffs. Save for High Noon, none of his movies now has any more name recognition than the man himself. Few millennials who happen to hear Fred Astaire sing Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in Blue Skies understand the meaning of the stanza in which Astaire imagines himself “dressed up like a million-dollar trouper / Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper, / Super duper.” For them, his once-ubiquitous name is a stone-dead metaphor.
What happened to Cooper has happened to the vast majority of movie stars of the thirties and forties. Only a handful, among them Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, and Cary Grant, are known to the public at large. A few others, like Clark Gable, are remembered for having appeared in specific films that have retained their pop-culture currency. The rest have vanished into the memory hole. Mention Jimmy Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, or Spencer Tracy to the average American under the age of 40 and all you’ll get in return is a blank stare . . . but John Wayne abides.
Taken together, the reasons why Wayne is remembered and Cooper forgotten say much about the condition of American culture today. Some of them are, of course, entirely intuitive. The Naked Edge, Cooper’s last film, was released shortly after his death in 1961; Wayne’s The Shootist came out in 1976, and he made his final public appearances three years later. Not only is he closer to us in time, but many of the films for which he is now best known—She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, El Dorado, True Grit—were shot in color, while virtually all of Cooper’s major films were in black and white. It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who spends even a modest amount of time with young people that they shy away from black-and-white movies, which they mostly find “unrelatable.”
Nevertheless, Cooper and Wayne are likely to strike the casual observer as having been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Tony Soprano described its pattern in the first episode of The Sopranos when he asked his psychotherapist, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings—he just did what he had to do.” Both men were not so much performers as presences, rugged-looking outdoor types who were capable of dominating the frame simply by striding into it, and when they got around to saying something, it was in craggy baritone voices that matched their weather-whacked faces.
Cooper, who was six years older than Wayne, had gotten his start in silent pictures, and by the time the talkies came along, he knew he didn’t have to say much to seize and hold an audience’s attention. All he needed was a handful of monosyllables to turn the trick. A case in point was “You want to call me that, smile,” the only well-remembered line that he ever spoke on screen. It comes from The Virginian, Victor Fleming’s 1929 film version of Owen Wister’s western novel and Cooper’s first all-talking film, and it summed up his on-screen personality so completely that he would be identified with it forever after.
Wayne is just as closely associated with a line that he never actually spoke on camera, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” But he did say “There are some things a man just can’t run away from” in John Ford’s Stagecoach, the 1939 film that made him a star, and that closely similar sentiment is an apt summing-up of the two men’s screen personas: They played men who knew what they had to do and did it. It is no less revealing that they both knew how to act with a smile, even when the joke was on them. Because their masculinity was so completely of a piece, they didn’t mind being teased.
Above all, Cooper and Wayne were leading men pur sang, the kind of personalities to whom your eyes reflexively shift whenever they’re in a shot. What a star is, they were. As Howard Hawks said, “If you don’t get a damn good actor with Wayne, he’s going to blow him right off the screen, not just by the fact that he’s good, but by his power, his strength.” Cooper was no less potently endowed with the same quality. When Niven Busch was wrestling with one of his scripts, Cooper told him, “Well, Niven, seems to me if you make me the hero it usually comes out right.” Nothing else worked for either man, which is why they were still playing leads long after their contemporaries had shifted into supporting parts.
All this notwithstanding, the differences between Cooper and Wayne are more salient than their similarities. Wayne knew what he did best and kept on doing it throughout his career. When he expressed a brief desire to branch out from the stereotypical roles that made him rich and famous, a shrewd friend told him, “You big dumb son of a bitch. . . . The American public decided to take you into their homes and their hearts. They like the man they see. Forget all this other junk.” So he did and never regretted having done so. Moreover, his iron determination to stick to his last would serve him as well posthumously as it did during his lifetime. Some of Wayne’s films are, to say the least, better than others, but his performances are all perfectly known quantities: Even now, you still watch him in order to satisfy the same robust appetite that might lead you to order a T-bone for dinner instead of a chef salad.
Not so Cooper. While he always played the hero, he did so in a wide variety of dramatic contexts, giving identically convincing performances in Ball of Fire, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Friendly Persuasion, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Westerner, and—yes—The Fountainhead. To be sure, he did make some 20-odd westerns (not counting silents). Surprisingly few of them, however, are distinguished, and no more than a half-dozen, including The Westerner, Garden of Evil, The Hanging Tree, They Came to Cordura, The Virginian, and the now-iconic High Noon, are first-rate. Whether or not Cooper’s range made him a better actor than Wayne is a matter of opinion, but it definitely makes it that much harder for today’s filmgoers to get a fix on him, which has surely contributed to his comparative obscurity.
Nor was Wayne nearly so much of a “strong, silent type” as Cooper, whose roles are noteworthy without exception for how little he says in them. Similarly, his line readings are always admirably direct and straightforward, but hardly ever distinctive. Wayne, by contrast, never failed to put an indelibly personal spin on his lines. “You want that gun? Pick it up. I wish you would,” he says to one of the bad guys in Rio Bravo, and no sooner do you hear him say it than the way in which he speaks the last four words, at once threatening and amused, is permanently etched into your memory.
Above all, Cooper had access to an emotion from which Wayne consistently steered clear: self-doubt. It is his ability to project doubt that is at the heart of High Noon (1952), in which he plays a small-town marshal who, faced with a crisis, gradually realizes that no one in town will help him. At no point does he succumb to fear—he is, after all, Gary Cooper—but when the clock runs out, it becomes shockingly clear that he doubts both his ability to live through the day and, more disturbingly, the wisdom of his decision to stand up for what he knows is right.
The subtlety with which Cooper conveys Will Kane’s cold-sweat fear is part and parcel of his minimalistic approach to film acting, which never failed to mystify those who shared the screen with him. As Brian Garfield has written in Western Films, which contains one of the most penetrating appreciations of Cooper’s art to appear in print:
Wayne was a minimalist, too, one who famously summed up his approach to acting in three words: “Don’t act. React.” Nor were his characters afraid to admit their fears: he was never more moving than when, in The Shootist (1976), he played a gunfighter dying of cancer who called himself “a dying man, scared of the dark.” But the strong, not-so-silent men he played were never in doubt, not about anything at all. Small wonder that Wayne briefly lost his temper when his secretary praised a screenplay to him as being full of ambiguity. “Screw ambiguity,” he replied. (One may take leave to doubt that she quoted him precisely.) “Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don’t like ambiguity. I don’t trust ambiguity.” Small wonder, too, that he hated High Noon, which he correctly interpreted as an anti-anti-Communist parable, though he liked and admired Cooper, so much so that he made the characteristically gracious gesture of accepting the older man’s Oscar for High Noon—Cooper was in Europe the night of the 1953 awards ceremony—calling him “one of the nicest fellas I know” and joking that he was now going to ask his manager “why I didn’t get High Noon instead of Cooper!”
It is no accident that the two Wayne performances most admired by critics are in Red River (1948) and The Searchers, in which he plays strong but misguided men who are tempted to commit acts of great evil. But the fact that he so rarely played such men goes a long way toward explaining his enduring popularity. Unlike Cooper, Wayne was almost always forthrightly heroic, which is why his films are so comforting to watch at a time when such heroism is viewed askance by the culture in which we live. Our antiheroes are dark knights who are too deeply wounded to be fully trusted, just as our psychopathic villains are too sympathetic to be unequivocally hated. “You’re just a freak—like me!” the Joker tells Batman in The Dark Knight, and we’re expected to believe him. No doubt we should, but I find it hard not to be seduced by the siren song of the tall-in-the-saddle hero who in 1971 told a newspaper reporter, “Some people tell me everything isn’t black and white. But I say why the hell not?” At the very least, it’s pretty to think so.
