Smile When You Say That, Pilgrim

Thirty years ago today, the Duke ambled off, or maybe rode off on ol' Dollar, or strode away, or however you'd like phrase it.

In his honor, National Review Online has a symposium with several media and journalism figures, mostly on the conservative side, offering their thoughts on him. Unsurprisingly, most like him.

He's hit and miss, of course, like anyone who had such a long career. True Grit, The Searchers, The Sands of Iwo Jima, Hondo, The Quiet Man...these and several others show that he was in fact an actor as much as he was a movie star. But there's also Big Jim McLain, The Alamo and The Green Berets, movies that have their own moments and probably seemed like good ideas at the time, but which, shall we say, haven't aged well.

He did war movies and cop movies and ship movies, but of course he's known mostly for one genre, the Western, and he made one of those his final entry, The Shootist. So I imagine that if our imaginations in this world have any kind of impact on what kind of life we have in the next, John Wayne's heaven looks a lot like Monument Valley, and you could do a lot worse.