What was the highest-grossing movie starring John Wayne?
Actor John Wayne is an undisputed—albeit controversial—titan of cinema, occupying the lead role in some of the best-loved movies of his day. He was able to back up the popularity of his performances at the box office, with at least ten of his films during a golden period between 1954 and 1969 grossing $10million or more. In fact, three of them grossed over $30m in the United States alone.
This period was when Wayne came into his own as a star, developing his archetypal surly and morally ambivalent cowboy persona, a mean-talking, hard-drinking, flawed hero with the smarts to complement his swagger. Wayne’s characters might have been less mysterious and ultimately less ambiguous than Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name”, but there’s no question that they informed the development of the Dollars trilogy’s anti-hero.
It wasn’t just Wayne’s roles that were perfected between the mid-1950s and late 1960s. The filmmakers he worked with raised the bar for the cinematic western, placing him in historic masterpieces like The Searchers (John Ford), Rio Bravo and El Dorado (both Howard Hawks), and True Grit (Henry Hathaway). But none of these high watermarks for the western genre grossed anywhere near as much as the two movies Wayne made in the early ‘60s.
These two pictures earned a stunning $97m at the box office over successive years, numbers that were almost unheard of at the time. Unsurprisingly, one of them was the top box office draw for 1962, outranking Lawrence of Arabia, and the other came in at number two for 1963, behind only Cleopatra.
So, what were Wayne’s top two hits?
The films in question were both epic in scope. The Longest Day is a World War Two drama focusing on the D-Day landings in Normandy. Almost all of its main characters are real historical figures, with Wayne playing Benjamin H Vandervoort, a lieutenant colonel of the US Army considered one of the heroes of the operation. In 1944, his character was less than half Wayne’s age at the time the film was shot. But when Hollywood’s casting an all-American war hero, age doesn’t come into it.
Meanwhile, 1963’s How the West Was Won was one of the most spectacular movies John Ford ever made, a sprawling three-hour picture requiring three-panel panoramas to capture the full extent of its visual scale. The film also features one of the most remarkable ensemble casts in history, assembling what feels like half the leading lights of Hollywood’s Golden Age. James Stewart, Carroll Baker, Debbie Reynolds, Henry Fonda, Lee J Cobb, Gregory Peck and Thelma Ritter all get their moment in the spotlight. As if that’s not enough, Spencer Tracy was called in to narrate the thing.
Yet it’s The Longest Day, which takes the crown as Wayne’s highest-grossing movie, having taken over $50m at the box office. Ironically, then, his most popular picture in numerical terms isn’t a western. It’s a war epic in which this giant of the western genre is playing a mere supporting role.
In the final analysis, though, an actor’s legacy isn’t all about box-office grossings. And Wayne, whose westerns have become staples of TV syndication, has left a legacy stretching far beyond the lines of cinema ticket halls.
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