There are few actors who define national attitudes. Wayne is one of them. He matured in a simpler time, when white hat vs. black hat was expected, not just acceptable. He didn't need to be anything more than an archetype, his presence was cartoonish...the hapless bad guys were equally cartoonish. His triumphs affirmed who we were as Americans.<br /><br />He was displaced by flinty Clint, the iconoclast. But Clint, for the most part, also faced cartoon bad guys.<br /><br />The current postmodern hero archetype is Willis in the "Die Hard" narrative -- the ironic hero now has to face off with fully dimensional villains. Most studios now invest in getting the perceived 'best villain', and all other considerations form a line behind that.<br /><br />So it's shocking to see this today...the mind has to jump back not one, but two generations and adjust.<br /><br />This is a failure on many levels. The visual storytelling is distinctly uncinematic -- it would pass for a "Little House on the Prairie" TV show. The acting and props are horrible. <br /><br />Wayne tries to stay aloof, brushing aside everyone in his path with smoking barrels and one-liners. He tries to validate for us that "a man can't ignore his duty".<br /><br />By 1973, this no longer worked. Whatever Wayne had built up for us in "True Grit" or even the "Green Berets" was lost forever...like sand against a tsunami caused by Vietnam and all of its flotsam and jetsam that rushed at us(My Lai, Kent State, the bombing of Cambodia, etc.) We were rapidly becoming a nation of quiche-eaters.