John Wayne once picked his favourite John Ford films
Notorious for his deeply racist and misogynistic views that were disgracefully outdated even for the time, it’s nevertheless frustratingly hard to deny that John Wayne played a powerful role in the history of US cinema.
The John Wayne persona came to define the archetypal red-blooded American hero, the quietly gruff macho man that we see in films to this day. Wayne himself famously explained it as “…deliberate a projection as you’ll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint and a way of moving.”
But almost just as famous in the Wayne canon as his trademark physical characteristics is his frequent work with director John Ford. Beginning almost 90 years ago with Stagecoach, the director/actor collaboration would endure for three decades and saw them make significant contributions to the western and war genres.
Their extensive filmography together is partly explained by Wayne’s attitude toward Ford, whom he clearly viewed as a man of similar standing. “I never had a goddamn artistic problem in my life, never, and I’ve worked with the best of them,” Wayne says, making clear his attitude about the craft of filmmaking. He goes on mention Ford, stating, “John Ford isn’t exactly a bum, is he? Yet he never gave me any manure about art. He just made movies, and that’s what I do.”
Making movies is exactly what they did, and out of all of them, there are two in particular that Ford considers their finest work together. Speaking to The People’s Almanac in 1977, the actor was asked to give his five favourite films of all time; he singled out two of his own films, clearly regarding them with great respect.
The Quiet Man is a romantic drama about the return of an Irish American boxer to his rural home in Ireland, who falls deeply in love with a local woman. It was an unusual choice for Wayne and Ford, who had previously focused on more action-based narratives, yet the result won John Ford his fourth ‘Best Director’ Oscar. As a pick of Wayne’s, not just one of his favourite collaborations with the director but one of his favourite films of all time, it suggests perhaps that Wayne wanted to try more emotional stories if only he was given the opportunity.
The Searchers, a western epic that follows Wayne as Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards on the hunt for a missing girl, is generally considered to be the most singularly influential and definitive film ever made. The film’s legacy has permeated throughout the frames of countless other movies, having a profoundly large impact on filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and David Lean and even providing visual and thematic references for Star Wars. Regarded as a masterpiece and regularly cited as one of the greatest movies in history, it’s unsurprising that Wayne shares the same opinion about his own film.
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