Men Will Be Boys

Donovan's Reef. Boys will be boys in John Wayne movies, and everybody knows what that means: it means they're scared to grow up and be men. But they sure work hard at pretending to, and Big John (who is 56) works hardest of all. At every opportunity he battles a bottle, slugs a stooge, and generally behaves as though a man's-capacity could be measured in whisky and his importance by his punch. But when a woman appears, Big John looks suddenly small and surrounded by unimaginable terrors, like a Boy Scout trapped in a beauty parlor.

In this movie, Hero Wayne has at last found a way to deal with women that seems to satisfy him: he pretends they are men. That allows him, without compunction, to work off his panic and resentment in two->fisted horseplay. When the heroine (Elizabeth Allen) arrives at the Pacific island where Wayne runs a grog shop, he promptly plops her into the lagoon. Then he dumps her in a canoe, knocks her down in the surf, drags her to his Jeep. When she squeals, he sneers. Can't take it, huh? But next day she proves she can dish it out: she beats him in a swimming race. He reluctantly admits she's a good guy and offers her a lei, but she holds out for a wedding ring, and in the end he has to face the awful truth: boys will be boys but wives are always women.

The film has its funny moments, some of them intentional. A small boy, forced to play an angel in a Christmas pageant, grimly determines to make the best of a bad situation--on top of his halo he wears a Stan Musial cap. But most of the film is intolerable Technicolored tarradiddle, absolutely the worst movie ever directed by the illustrious John Ford (The Informer, Stagecoach). Watching him make such stuff is like watching Escoffier make mudpies.

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