ONE OF THE great joys of the movies is their ability to convince us that we know the people on screen. Even the varied performances of the most versatile stars are often not strong enough to prevail against the overarching image we’ve formed of them. When Joan Didion met John Wayne on the set of the 1965 The Sons of Katie Elder, she wrote of having the sense that his face was more familiar to her than her husband’s.

And yet Wayne, whose centenary occurred this past spring, remains in some ways the most undefined of iconic movie stars. When we say we “know” Humphrey Bogart or Greta Garbo, or George Clooney or Julia Roberts, we’re talking about the intimacy we feel from having watched them at work. But much of what’s “known” of John Wayne depends on ignoring what’s on screen.

To the left, Wayne has always been close to a comic-book version of American power in all its swaggering crudeness. That his screen persona was neither swaggering nor crude hardly ma...

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