Every week, the familiar backside of James Arness filled the screen and he moved warily away from us, to confront an anonymous gunslinger further down the street and blast the next episode of Gunsmoke into action. It originated on radio in 1952, with William Conrad playing the role of Marshal Matt Dillon. When CBS decided to create the television version, Conrad was deemed too hefty for the part, yet he continued in the radio role until the early 1960s. The role of the marshal was initially offered to John Wayne, who was not interested in doing a weekly series, yet he did introduce the first broadcast of the program.
    Gunsmoke started the trend for TV westerns, which ultimately led to there being 30 of them on the air at one time. However, it outlasted all of them and at the time of its cancellation in 1975, it was the only show of its kind still on the air. Considered to be the first adult TV western (which it probably was if those adults were simple-minded enough) it was certainly the beginning of a genre that for a time would dominate our lives.
    Westerns were already fading away at the movies, although that didn’t mean an occasional classic couldn’t still bob up. Such was John Ford’s The Searchers—a two man epic of astonishingly boring length and magnificent scenery that prevailed because John Wayne again stepped up for one of his most awesome performances. Natalie Wood is kidnapped by the Indians and the two men hunt her for years but for different reasons—Jeffrey Hunter to rescue her, John Wayne to kill her, to put her out of her misery because she has been polluted by the redskins.
    Whatever you might think of his values (which, as an Australian I was trained to despise from birth and still do), the fact remains that in terms of bums in seats and enduring worldwide popularity, John Wayne is the greatest of all film stars, and is so by an enormous margin. Moreover, he is the only film star whose persona exerted important influence outside the entertainment industry, primarily in generating the perfect image of America as the world’s policeman. Everything that is right and wrong with that concept was right and wrong about him.