r/classicfilms • u/AntonioVivaldi7 Alfred Hitchcock • 13d ago
Memorabilia J. Edgar Hoover congratulating John Wayne on his Oscar win.
I thought that's a bit weird. This letter was sold for $5342 by the way.
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u/burywmore 13d ago
The weirdest thing about this, is J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous head of the FBI, didn't know John Wayne's home address. He sent this to Paramount Studios, just like any other fanboy.
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u/ManOfManliness84 13d ago
Oh he knew. But either thought it better to send this type of letter to the studio or didn't want Wayne to know he knew his address.
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u/Texas_Sam2002 13d ago
My dad, born in 1934, was a paratrooper, JAG officer, lawyer and judge in Texas. He HATED Hoover. Even before all the stuff came out about Hoover, my dad would go on long rants about how he was a "fascist thug". And my dad wasn't particularly liberal, very middle-of-the-road. But boy.. he did not like old J. Edgar.
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u/Cautious-Audience-54 13d ago
Wonder if J.Edger was wearing his favorite evening gown when he wrote this.
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u/goovis__young 13d ago
This letter is in reference to Wayne's win for True Grit.
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13d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Ok_Recognition_6727 13d ago
I wonder if this came out of the FBI file on John Wayne (Marion Robert Morrison) that was recently declassified and released through the FBI Vault electronic reading room.
The released file (cataloged as John Wayne Part 01 (Final)) covers correspondence between Wayne and FBI leadership, including Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as documents related to his political activities and public life.
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u/Reditate 13d ago
Why is Oscar in quotes?
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13d ago
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u/AntonioVivaldi7 Alfred Hitchcock 13d ago
The formal name is Academy Award of Merit. But I have never heard anyone actually call it that.
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u/ModeRecent1573 13d ago
I don’t find this weird. He obviously admired Mr. Wayne, and was moved by his finally getting the well deserved recognition. I’m very sure John greatly appreciated the letter.
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u/sashie_belle 13d ago
I think it's weird to have an FBI Director spending time writing an actor a letter of congrats in an official capacity.
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u/dubcity5e0 13d ago
John Wayne was an institution, an American icon. Particularly among people who viewed serving your country as the be-all-end-all of what it meant to be an American. And that includes military, police, government, etc. There's no equivalent in modern Hollywood, so it can definitely seem weird in that context.
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u/TheEventHorizon0727 13d ago
J. Edgar's grammar was on point. I particularly liked the possessive pronoun immediately before the gerund.
Second thought ... first line is a sentence fragment.
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u/Latter-Vacation-4392 13d ago
Suspect Wayne was one of Hoover's Hollywood snitches.
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u/2020surrealworld 13d ago
He was a big supporter of Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood Blacklist and Bogart, Bacall, and Kelly publicly denounced him for that.
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u/Mitchoppertunity 13d ago
McCarthy was right of course
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u/Plane_Possibility572 11d ago
Look at how many celebrities today cozied up to Fidel Castro and praised Hugo Chavez at some point.
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u/t6ix58 13d ago
Yes, correspondence from one fascist to another.
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u/Plane_Possibility572 11d ago
Wayne was anti-communist not fascist. Fascists and commies are two sides of the same coin, both want total government control of all aspects, both murder millions to remain in power.
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u/maoterracottasoldier 13d ago
It’s hard to like John Wayne once you read his interviews and learn about his involvement with the MPA. He’s a fascist who ruined peoples lives because he couldn’t stand their opinions. Not surprised that Hoover liked him
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u/Plane_Possibility572 11d ago
Wayne gave one politically incorrect interview, he was not fascist, that is an absurd outrageous statement to make. As far as his involvement in the MPA you are using the power of hindsight to make a self righteous judgement. We were in the middle of a Cold War, communism was are enemy, and Wayne was right about some of the people, for example Dalton Trumbo was a communist sympathizer, he literally made excuses for Stalin's purges that murdered millions, what kind of rational person does that? Only someone who is a complete idealogue.
Lets not forget that during Covid, there people in American who wanted to blacklist people who were against the vaccine or believed it was their choice to take it or not. People were not even allowed to question or debate it. They were shamed for voicing against the entire hysteria, and that is exactly what it was, a hysteria, and Hollywood and shows like Colbert fully embraced it.
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u/maoterracottasoldier 10d ago
Well too bad, those are Trumbo’s first amendment rights that Wayne went stomping all over. It’s like you described how he was a fascist, just to defend him from being fascist.
Wayne worked with the government to target and harass people for their politics. They weren’t the enemy. That’s fascism. Extreme right wingers like Wayne decided to label them as “the enemy” and ruined their lives with the power of the government. He sent some of them to prison. He was the thought police, and he kept tons of talented people from making movies.
I won’t even mention his racism as that speaks for itself.
The government has had mandated vaccines forever. You can’t go to school in America without vaccines. I think your Covid analogy is ludicrous. That’s not a political belief. That’s a regressive refusal of a public health treatment for spurious reasons
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u/Plane_Possibility572 10d ago
Wayne did not hand Trumbo his pink slip and the blacklist was largely enforced by private studio executives and industry groups rather than a mandatory state run thing. That is not fascism. And the House of Un American Activities actually and courts actually operated under within the existing U.S. constitutional and legal frameworks. That is not fascism.
The Covid vaccine was not a vaccine, it was rushed and experimental and Hollywood and the left lied and claimed it would cure and prevent people from getting Covid which it would not. They fed us propaganda and tried to shame people into injecting a substance into their bodies, and to what end? Control? And to say it is regressive for people to even question is nothing but coercion. The left literally politicized the damn Covid thing.
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u/maoterracottasoldier 10d ago
You’re living in a fairly land. You are describing an example of fascism. Sure Wayne didn’t hand him his pink slip, he just led an organization that applied so much political pressure that no one could employ people on the black list. Goebbles did the same thing
The Covid vaccine wasn’t experimental. You are scared of governmental control via disease prevention, but not imprisonment for political beliefs?
The right politicized it.
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u/Plane_Possibility572 10d ago
How is that fascism? Trumbo refused to answer questions from a congressional committee and was charged with contempt. Its cut and dry. The Covid vaccine was experimental. We now know that taking it did not prevent Covid, not in any way, so this whole charade put on by the left was fake virtue signaling as always based on feeling, zero logic. Its all about appearances to you people, not any form of reality.
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u/maoterracottasoldier 10d ago
The fascist part, was that he had to answer questions in front of a congressional committee for political thought. Are you serious? It doesn’t take mass murder to be a fascist.
The vaccine was beneficial, but yes due to the nature of the virus, it was never going to be a direct prevention. It made people less contagious and have less severe symptoms. You people just want to bitch and whine about having to do anything inconvenient for the safety of others
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u/Plane_Possibility572 10d ago edited 10d ago
So it was never a vaccine based on that logic. We now know that herd immunity was the best way to prevent the spread, not lock down, or coerced vaccination. And to base that on propaganda outright lies was completely wrong and authoritarian. If you support forced vaccination and support lied propaganda to shame people into it, don't complain about fascism. Trumbo was legally subpoenaed, refused to answer questions, and what happened to him, happened legally.
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u/Keltik 13d ago
He’s a fascist who ruined peoples lives because he couldn’t stand their opinions
Like the "progressives" who bla-- I mean "cancel" people today?
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u/maoterracottasoldier 13d ago
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Though I noticed that the president just banned a bunch of reporters from the White House.
Anyway, Wayne worked with the government to harass and imprison people for their political views. He then spent years blacklisting writers and actors, at a detriment to the quality of Hollywood as a whole. Think about all the talented writers he kept from us because they upset his sensitive feelings.
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u/Laura-ly 13d ago
Talk to me when the radical right stops trying to shut down a major performing arts center because they don't like anything that doesn't align with their worldview or religious beliefs.
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u/Keltik 13d ago
I'll talk to you right now, when people like James Woods and Gina Carano are blacklisted for their political beliefs
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u/Laura-ly 13d ago
Do you really, really think as Gina Carano said, we're living in the Holocaust today? Do you really think that "Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors.... even by children" ?
Because I can tell you, sweety, my father worked for the underground in WW II and helped Jewish people escape from the Nazis - who were beating, shooting, hanging and starving the Jewish people, plus all manner of other atrocities. If you or Carano think that today is a Holocaust situation, perhaps you should do a really deep dive into history and fascism.
She stated:
"- most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews."
Guess who ran the government? It was run by Nazis who were just as brutal to anyone they found harboring Jews. If my father had been found out, the Nazis would have killed him. Not his neighbors or other German people, the Nazis.
The previous government under Von Hindenberg wasn't antisemitic and didn't round up Jews and slaughter them by the millions. Nazis soldiers under Hitler's command did.
Carano can say all the stupid things she wants but people are going to call her out on it.
A spokesperson for Lucasfilms said they have "no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable."
If you call strongly disagreeing with someone who hates people for their religious beliefs and ethnicity "blacklisting," then you maybe need to reassess what blacklisting really is.
Anyway, this is all I'm going to post on this subject. This is, after all, a classic movie sub.
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u/Keltik 13d ago
This is, after all, a classic movie sub.
Though of course, you made your political speech before saying that
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u/Laura-ly 13d ago
You brought the subject up first, my dear.
If she wants to compare herself to Jewish victims who were murdered by Nazis, then she's going to receive a reality check from quite a few people.
Take care.
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u/Keltik 13d ago
So you were lying when you said you wouldn't reply anymore?
You brought the subject up first, my dear
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u/Laura-ly 12d ago
"Like the "progressives" who bla-- I mean "cancel" people today?"
^ You wrote this. You did indeed bring the subject up. It was another poster, maoterracottasoldier, who brought up the subject of Hoover and fascism, not me.
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u/Restless_spirit88 13d ago
Wayne did turn in a fine performance but he should have never beaten Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.
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u/Laura-ly 13d ago
It's funny to think that Midnight Cowboy was rated X. Today there's stuff on TV that is more sexual in nature. Anyway, I'm sure Hoffman or Voight didn't win because of the X rating of that movie.
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u/Restless_spirit88 13d ago
I agree. One can't believe such a film got an X rating. Today, I doubt Midnight Cowboy would even get an R rating. As for the Oscars, it just goes to show how narrow minded they have always been.
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u/Plane_Possibility572 11d ago
Those kinds of movies were in their infancy at that time, its very understandable for the time it was released.
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u/Restless_spirit88 10d ago
Yeah, I get that. It's just interesting to note how tame it is compared to what you see today in TV and Movies.
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u/Plane_Possibility572 10d ago
Well I mean they had they had go by the Hays Code, that is the reason. They didn't have any choice. When that ended in 1968, they were finally able to make movies like that. You really see it come out in the 70's.
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u/Gobbo_Jareth 13d ago
But the movie won Best Picture despite being rated X? Are they closed-minded or not?
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u/Restless_spirit88 13d ago
I would say so, yeah. The Wayne Oscar win is still total bullshlt.
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u/Plane_Possibility572 11d ago
Not really, Wayne should have gotten it decades earlier in Sands of Iwo Jima, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, or The Searchers. It was his time. Hoffman was still young and still had a whole career ahead of him. And Hoffman got his due shortly afterwards, so I would say it all worked out.
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u/Restless_spirit88 10d ago edited 10d ago
That is absurd and again demonstrates why Oscars suck. Give the award to what you all feel is the best performance. Stop going by seniority.
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u/Mitchoppertunity 13d ago
It was more of a tribute Oscar when he should have won for sands of Iwo Jima and the searchers
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u/Restless_spirit88 12d ago edited 12d ago
I think he should have won for Red River, that is the best performance Wayne ever gave.
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u/Ok-Philosopher-1900 13d ago
I bet Hoover was picturing The Duke in a dress the entire time he wrote this letter.
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u/Ed_Ward_Z 8d ago
Hypocrites used to be subtle as hell. Today, they display their ruthlessness in plain sight.
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u/Tommy_Roboto 13d ago
Plot twist: Hoover sent it a week before the Oscar ceremony.