Steve (John Wayne): How'd you do last season?
Father Malone (Tom Tully): We showed up for every game.
Steve: I'd say that was raw courage.
Most people probably think of westerns when they think of John Wayne. Or maybe war movies.
But "Trouble Along the Way," which premiered on this day in 1953, was neither.
I suppose you have to give credit for that to John Ford's "The Quiet Man," which premiered in 1952. That, I believe, was the first John Wayne movie that did not cast the Duke as a cowboy or a serviceman, and it opened up a whole new world for him, one on which movie production companies were only too happy to capitalize.
Ford didn't direct "Trouble Along the Way." Michael Curtiz (who directed "Casablanca") did. I don't often use the word heartwarming to describe a movie, but I could apply it to this one. I could also apply other words that are not as complimentary, but I think the writers may have realized that. To compensate, they loaded the script with dialogue that, in my opinion, was far wittier than most movies that were made in the late '40s and early '50s.
For example, when Wayne and Father Burke (Charles Coburn) were talking about the football program at St. Anthony's College, Wayne asked, "What system do you use?"
"'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,'" Burke replied. "But, usually, the others do it to us first."
In "Trouble Along the Way," Wayne played a recently divorced football coach (actually a college athletics instructor who was chronically unemployed because he was apparently incapable of getting along with the folks in charge). He needed to find a job to retain custody of his daughter.
Meanwhile the folks at St. Anthony's faced the prospect of having to shut down due to heavy debt, but Father Burke theorized that the school could get out of debt if it fielded a winning football team because that would attract the financial support of well–to‐do alumni.
To accomplish this, Wayne was hired to coach St. Anthony's football team.
(By the way, if you're a football fan, you probably believe the myth that Vince Lombardi was the first to say, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." Lombardi did say it, but he wasn't the first; in fact, it was John Wayne in "Trouble Along the Way.")
I suppose it goes without saying that Wayne's character had some rough edges. Thus, to smooth out those edges, Donna Reed entered the picture as a social worker.
By the way, film buffs should look for James Dean in an uncredited appearance as a football spectator.
