John Wayne Reviews 'Brokeback Mountain'

By: George Thomas Clark You never did and never will see a movie end with my face being used to mop the floor of a saloon. But I certainly could play a sensitive man and didn't always have to get the girl. Remember "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance"? I shot Lee Marvin to save Jimmy Stewart even though he'd won the woman I loved.

Still, one time at a party I chewed out Kirk Douglas for playing a weak and whining and suicidal Van Gogh in "Lust for Life." I told him real men don't act like that, and as leading men we have an obligation to be strong and stoic and tough as hell. I still can't believe Kirk took that Van Gogh role. Imagine what he'd say if I'd done all those things on Brokeback Mountain.

But I agreed to see the movie. Disguised by a cap and shades, I slide in the back of a darkened theater. Several people twist anyway and wide-eyed ask, aren't you?? Sure I am, Martha Washington, now turn around and watch the goddamn movie.

The scenery in Wyoming is stunning, and I love those mountains so beautiful and harsh and the way the cowboys, Jack and Ennis, ride around herding the sheep and eating beans and shooting elk and talking like cowboys almost tough as ones I played. Ennis even gets to beat up two bikers.

Then there's that scene in the tent during the blizzard....I don't enjoy the sight, but I'm not going to lie, I like the tension. I like real emotions. I made a couple hundred movies, many of them still damn good, and I know moviemaking.

"Turn around," I tell another lady. The homosexuals in the theater know not to gawk.

The movie starts getting good. Ennis and Jack marry fine horny women. The night he meets her, Jack's girl jumps on top of him in a car and rips off her bra and demands sex right there. The guy responds. Maybe this is going to be a happy movie. Maybe these cowboys are all right after all. Maybe they're going to be cured. Screwing those girls will make them studs and they won't want that other stuff.

But out of the blue a few years later Jack arranges to visit Ennis, and Ennis runs outside, thinking they're out of sight, and grabs Jack and they start kissing in a way that'll shock most people, especially Ennis' poor wife who sees this and says nothing and doesn't protest when Ennis says they're going drinking and will probably get to talking so don't expect them home that night.

The cowboys start taking fishing trips once or twice a year and their wives know what's going on. They never bring back any fish, just a bunch of bullshit.

Ennis' wife leaves him and he gets an even prettier girlfriend but that doesn't do any good either. Maybe he wishes he'd accepted Jack's now long-ago offer to go off, the two of them, and get a little ranch. Ennis said he can't do that, he's got kids and responsibilities. And they could get killed. Years before his father had taken the little boy to see the mutilated corpses of a couple of cowboy queers. Ennis knows that could be them. He prefers what he has, child support and loneliness.

Jack's got an unhappy wife and asshole father-in-law-employer, and a girlfriend and a boyfriend on the side, and all this is damned entertaining, and of course I'm not going to reveal the end but I'll tell you privately -- I liked Kirk as Van Gogh.