John Wayne’s five best movies, according to John Wayne
No figure encourages more polarising opinions than John Wayne. His racist outbursts would colour a career that had been incredibly dense in movies and rich in iconography.
While Wayne certainly became something of a lambasted and contentious character for his right-wing political views, it’s equally undeniable that his larger-than-life presence made him a cultural symbol of the Hollywood movie industry and of the American West.
The Duke earned acclaim throughout his five-decade-spanning career, often playing gravelly-voiced cowboys with a trademark walk and an intense stare. There’s a surefire sense of masculinity in the Iowa-born actor, and he remains one of the most prominent symbols of Golden Age Hollywood long after his death.
The truth is, there was a lot to like about John Wayne if you were an American living in the post-war decades. He wasn’t just a true patriot in almost every sense of the word, but Wayne was happy to position himself as one of America’s first superheroes. In almost every movie he appeared in, Wayne would take up the role of moralistic tough guy, capable of dishing out punches but only in the good name of justice. It made his fall even more spectacular.
During a 1971 interview with Playboy, Wayne was asked whether he thought that his 1969 performance in Henry Hathaway’s western movie True Grit marked his finest film. After all, Wayne had won an Academy Award for his effort as US Marshal Rooster Cogburn – a role he would reprise a few years later with 1975’s sequel Rooster Cogburn.
While True Grit was indeed admired, Wayne himself was reticent to admit that it’s his best film, replying to the interviewer with the five movies he considers his finest work. “No, I don’t,” the iconic actor began. “Two classic Westerns were better—Stagecoach and Red River— and a third, The Searchers, which I thought deserved more praise than it got.”
Stagecoach is John Ford’s 1939 western starring Claire Trevor alongside Wayne, an adaptation of the 1937 Ernest Haycox short story ‘The Stage to Lordsburg’. The movie focuses on a group of strangers travelling together on a stagecoach through treacherous Apache territory, and it marked Wayne’s breakthrough role in the film industry.
Wayne also starred for another legendary director of western filmmaking, Howard Hawks, and he notes Hawk’s 1948 film Red River, in which The Duke starred alongside Montgomery Clift in a fictional account of the first-ever cattle drive through the Chisholm Trail from Texas to Kansas, another of Wayne’s undoubted classics.
On the set of Red River, Montgomery Clift and Wayne struggled to become friends. Clift was of a different generation and subsequently took the art of acting a little more seriously than Wayne. Clift tried to envelop himself with the character, while Wayne saw himself more as a player in the picture. Either way, the duo failed to be partners off-set.
No better is this shown than in the planned bear hunt headed up by Wayne and Howard Hawks. “We had an old Army sergeant as a guide,” the director’s son, David Hawks, said to Todd McCarthy for his book Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. “It was near the Mexican border. We were looking for smaller Mexican brown bears, and we rode and rode through the mountains. We never saw any bear, but we did get lost. The guide admitted that he didn’t know the way back. So, John Wayne took charge, and he really and truly led us back. One horse fell, lost its footing, and broke its leg, and we had to shoot it.”
Clift, however, was never interested in taking part. He had already labelled the boy’s party of Wayne and Hawks damaging. “They tried to draw me into their circle, but I couldn’t go along with them,” Clift shared. “The machismo thing repelled me because it seemed so forced and unnecessary.” In response to the failed bear-hunting trip, which had cost the set valuable time and a horse its life, Clift notes, “You see what happens when you turn a bunch of fascists loose in the hills?”
There’s another John Ford movie under Wayne’s self-admitted best, though: his 1956 Technicolor VistaVision western epic, The Searchers, based on Alan Le May’s 1954 novel. Wayne plays a middle-aged Civil War veteran who sets out to find his abducted niece in the company of his adopted nephew. But the Ford-Wayne love does not end there.
After all, Wayne was well known for his collaboration with the iconic director, so it’s no surprise to see that he considers several of the movies they made together as some of his favourites. “And The Quiet Man was certainly one of the best,” Wayne continued, stating his top choices from his personal filmography. “Also, the one that all the college cinematography students run all the time—The Long Voyage Home.”
The best movies John Wayne ever made:
- Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
- Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)
- The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
- The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)
- The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940)
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