According to history professor John Jeffries Martin, "it simply takes more time to research and prepare a manuscript on Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War or the Umayyad dynasty of the early Islamic world than one on Alfred Hitchcock or John Wayne" (Commentary, Bulletin, March 2003).

Thanks Professor Martin, there's my next research quickie. Let's see now...

John Wayne (born Marion Morrison) made 160 films in his 40-year career, averaging around 90 minutes each. I would have to watch each film at least once before drafting my hypotheses, then most of them again, and the most pertinent films three or four times. To ensure accuracy, I must review every film I quote. Multiple viewing is necessary because film study goes beyond plot and dialogue to subtleties of lighting, setting, props, camera angle, editing, music, narrative structure and social context.

For the amount of time those preliminaries would take, you do the math. I'm just a film guy.

As relatively few of those works are available in proper format on DVDs or lasers, I would need to spend several months at film archives in California and at the Library of Congress. There, I would also investigate 70 years of Wayne film reviews, interviews and studies. His persona draws more on the popular press than on theses. Among the latter, The Searchers alone has generated several books. In film studies, as in respectable academia, one has to cover what's established before advancing one's fresh scholarship.

Going in, I would need a solid grasp of the history and conventions of all Wayne's genres: the war film, melodrama, the Biblical epic, historical costume drama, romantic comedy, sports film, biography, musicals, South Seas adventure, circus film, sea epic, Hollywood drama, gold rush films, aviation drama. And, oh yes - the western.

I would be responsible for the bibliographies on all his directors, with additional viewing of non-Wayne films, to define his function in their respective canons, and the biographies, films and interviews of his major co-stars.

I would have to incorporate recent theory on film acting styles, gender representation, national cinema, persona theory, and the shifting relationships between popular art and the social and political currents over Wayne's 40 years.

On all these subjects, key material is sometimes available only in French. And this is just for ... John Wayne! Don't get me started on such heavyweights as Alfred Hitchcock or Woody Allen.

Obviously there are simpler studies to be done on Wayne - as there may be on Thucydides or the Umayyad. My point is there is nothing inherently easy about film studies.

I wonder that Professor Martin - a renaissance scholar, so to speak - so blithely assumes a historian who probes a modern event or principal has an easier time of it than a Classical historian. It's disappointing that such a reflex prejudice would be expressed with such assurance in a journal of the professoriate.

Maurice Yacowar
English & Film Studies, University of Calgary