Lost Star Wars Raider (Spoiler Alert)

“Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“Are you going to see it?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When the kids have gone back to school and the college kids are mostly done with it and I can slip in at some weekday matinee.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun.”

Sigh. “Go in peace.”

Two weeks later. “Have you seen it?”

“Yes, and before you ask, it’s too long, the fight and flight scenes are not thrilling, and it’s much too deferential to what has gone before in the series.”

“You didn’t like it.”

“Well, at least the ticket cost less than the diet drink.”

To be fair, I am very much not a member of the target audience. And, as a good friend would have it, I am often in the check-the-Other-box zone.  

In fact, my mother long ago in a time and space faraway created the axiom that if I like something, it has no commercial appeal, but if I don’t, then harness up the cash wagons.

“Not always” is my default defense.

When the first Star Wars episode came out in 1980, which was followed the next year with Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was just easing past my mid-20s. I thought them both wildly entertaining and great sendups of films I grew up watching. Especially in St. Petersburg, where I could go to the Cameo and watch the Saturday double feature for a quarter and buy popcorn and coke for another quarter. Yep, fifff-ty cents, and I was good to go for the afternoon.

And I watched a lot of movies. I don’t know whether there can be a genetic disposition toward film, but my dad’s grandfather opened the first movie theater in St. Pete. I suggest the possibility as an explanation for going to see Cleopatra four times the first week it opened. I was nine. Cost a buck a ticket, but for me the spectacle—and perhaps even Elizabeth Taylor, her eyes you know—was worth it.

The go-to films were westerns and war movies as I was all about the action. In my young eyes, John Wayne reigned supreme in theatres without stadium seating. Hatari, The Longest Day, How the West was Won, McLintock!, Circus World—the man could dominate any environment.

For me, though, it was the western icon—a fearless, indomitable, no-nonsense cowboy kind of guy—that resonated with me. I grew up on Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers, but for my money, it was John Wayne, John Wayne, John Wayne.

In 1967, Wayne pushed forward with The Green Berets, a pro-military take on the Vietnam War. He even bought out the rights of author Robin Moore who was being investigated for leaking secrets in his 1965 novel of the same title. The resulting film was a generally positive spin much appreciated by President Lyndon Johnson and the Pentagon folks.

In 1968, the film was released and the Tet offensive was launched and the rest is history. Sort of. Francis Ford Coppola gave us war as madness with Apocalypse Now in 1979—watch the original release, not the director’s cut—and Oliver Stone released Platoon in 1986 in part as a rebuke to Wayne’s worldview of Southeast Asia. Wayne said repeatedly his film was to honor soldiers who must do the job, not to make a political statement. Watch The Green Berets, and then watch Coppola’s film. It’s an easy call.

The following year, True Grit—his 129^th film—earned Wayne his first and only Oscar as Best Actor. After being a fat, drunk, aging marshal, Wayne mostly reverted to more heroic form playing cowboys and detectives before the movie that was apocalyptic to my way of thinking.

Wayne’s 140^th and final film, The Shootist, teamed him with Lauren Bacall and Jimmy Stewart. Again an aging and famed lawman, Wayne’s character is diagnosed with cancer and given two months to live. Ron Howard plays a young lad enthralled by the shootist’s heroic reputation, but the film’s melancholy tone and brutal finale upended the decades upon decades of Wayne playing “The Man”. I stayed seated until the credits finished rolling.

The man known as The Duke died 3 years later at 72—stomach cancer.

Which brings me back to Harrison Ford’s death roll as Han Solo in the latest installment, Episode 7 of Star Wars. Watch that scene, and then watch Wayne’s end as J.B. Books. It’s an easy call.