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John Wayne's imposing corporeality and easy comportment combined to create an enduring, complex, icon of masculinity, of the American West, and of America itself. This seminar will concentrate on the films that contributed most strongly to the establishment of, maturation of, and even deconstruction of, the iconography and mythology of the "John Wayne" character. This concentration will also bring into view the western and war film as genres; the crisis of (and performance of) masculinity in postwar culture; gender and sexuality in American national identity; the relation between individualism, community, and the state; the Western and national memory; and patriotism and the Vietnam War. Most courses on film are built around directors, genres, nations, or periods. A course on the films of John Wayne proposes that the body of films in which Wayne starred over 35 years demonstrate not only a coherence and consistency, but also a variety, that merits closer examination. Stars frequently exerted control over their materials (especially when they went on, as Wayne did, to head their own production companies), but this an aspect of filmmaking that has received little attention in the classroom. Wayne's work in this period occurs primarily in two genres: the western and the war film (with the cavalry films neatly straddling both of these). Many of his best films were directed by two of the foremost directors in the American pantheon ¿ John Ford and Howard Hawks: the chance to review their work with Wayne also serves as an occasion to explore the ways in which each differs from (and even comments upon) the other. Perhaps the most common criticism leveled against John Wayne as an actor was (and continues to be) that he was simply "being John Wayne." This course proposes that first, this is no small thing, and second, it is also not really true.