Wayne Stood His Ground: The Director Nobody Expected
He made The Alamo in 1960, directed it himself, poured everything into it, watched it underperform at the box office, and continued to believe it was exactly what he meant it to be.
There is something clarifying about a flop that the person responsible refuses to apologise for. Most people, when something they made is dismissed, do the graceful thing — they acknowledge what didn't work, they mention the learning experience, they move on. John Wayne did not do any of that. He made *The Alamo* in 1960, directed it himself, poured everything into it, watched it underperform at the box office, and continued to believe it was exactly what he meant it to be. That is either delusion or integrity, and the difference between those two things is usually just time.
The directorial debut that nobody asked John Wayne to have turned out to be the project he cared about most — which is almost always how it goes. The things that fail commercially are often the things that cost the most personally, because nobody bets everything on something they don't mean. Critics landed hard. Audiences were lukewarm. Wayne stood there in the rubble and said: I made the film I wanted to make. The clarity of that, even if you disagree with the result, is its own kind of position.
Meanwhile, Karlovy Vary has become the interesting festival right now — not Cannes-loud, not Venice-precious, but quietly accumulating films worth paying attention to. Trine Dyrholm turning up in Mads Mengel's *The Guest* is the kind of casting that makes you trust a film before you've seen a frame of it. The premise — a woman crashing back into a new father's life and destabilising everything — could be melodrama in lesser hands. With Dyrholm, it's something more unsettling. She has always known how to make warmth feel dangerous. Jan-Eric Mack's *A Happy Family* is doing similar work from a different angle: Switzerland as postcard, Switzerland as pressure cooker, the pandemic as the moment the cracks in the facade finally became visible to people who had been professionally not-noticing them. Both films are doing the thing European cinema does when it's operating well — using the specific to say something about the structural.
And then there's the anime corner, which I visit unironically: *Delicious in Dungeon*'s spiritual successor is coming in 2027, and if the description of Totoro-level warmth meeting monster-world logic holds up, that's going in the calendar now.
The flop that someone refused to disown. The festival film that trusts its cast completely. These are the same instinct operating at different scales — make the thing you mean, and then stand in front of it.
Wayne understood that. Dyrholm lives it. The rest is just box office.
