He did not push himself very often, nor was he pushed much by others.
Alan Dwan pushed him a little bit, in that memorable death scene in Sands of Iwo Jima; Howard Hawks, in Red River, dared it too and got what was arguably the best performance of his career out of him; and John Ford, content to let the man play himself most of the time, pushed hardest of all in The Searchers, and again got a stelllar effort from him.
The biggest push, the shocker, was more a matter of him being himself than he had ever been: True Grit, in which he let his belly sag, took out his false teeth, and used the kind of language that salted his off-camera conversations. Though hailed as his greatest role, it was closer to B roll.
In John Wayne's defense, it wasn't so much that his range was limited as it was inconvenient. Once he hit his stride in Ford's Stagecoach, after years of B incarnations that included a try as a singing cowboy (with the monniker of Singin' Sandy no less!), he became a symbol in fairly short order: America the Good, personifying that country's puritan swagger until the years when a posse of upstart longhairs took him down a notch.
His second directorial effort, the controversial The Green Berets, cut him loose once and for all from that generation, the next one in line to dictate who would rule and who wouldn't at of box office. By the time I came of age, a half decade later, John Wayne films had become complete clichés; relics from an age when the world was wrongfully simple. This was the Wayne of Rooster Cogburn and The Shootist, kept alive only by the nostalgia set and some middling revisionism.
But, for better or worse, time sheds new light. All is forgiven it appears, and today, Wayne sits tall in the saddle again, his oversized frame, weathered face, and condescending directness on TV, in DVD box sets, and between the pages of pictorial tributes, all in celebration of what would have been his 100th year.
Like Ethan in The Searchers, like Rooster in True Grit, he is being sought out for his larger than life capacities: his inexhaustible doggedness, his sagebrush savvy, his unsophisticated, macho wit - qualities that have weathered everything from deification to ridicule.
The point comes at you like the barrel of a gun: it takes more than the vagaries of public sentiment to kill John Wayne.
