The three greatest westerns ever made, according to John Wayne
There are some actors who become so inextricably tied to the genres that made them famous that it becomes impossible to see them in any other type of movie. Just consider the action star Bruce Willis or the serial whacky comedian Jim Carrey, but no other actor may better embody this truth than John Wayne, the king of the old American western that thrived in the early days of Hollywood supremacy.
The genre formed at a pivotal time for the American people. Thanks to their migratory past, the necessity to find history within their comparatively short time on the land once dubbed “The New World” has always been prevalent in American culture. It is part of the reason why authors like Edgar Allan Poe became so preoccupied with being haunted in their own homes, and it is why Westerns arrived so completely packaged for cinema.
These were stories that not only explored the history of the country, though some arrived only a handful of decades after the so-called “Wild West” was still throwing up dust into the air, but also had a central hero that could represent the moralistic preference of a country turning itself into an empire. Westerns, and the figure of the cowboy hero, would become a blueprint for how America imposed itself on the 20th century, and the man leading that charge was, invariably, John Wayne.
Rising to fame in the late 1920s, Wayne worked his way up from being a humble extra to becoming the industry’s most celebrated leading man, earning two Oscar nominations and one win for the 1970 western True Grit before his death in 1979. Throughout that period, he led the western genre from strength to strength, rising in prominence at the very same time as filmmaker John Ford, with the pair forming a formidable bond.
Their paths would cross for the very first time in 1939 in the movie Stagecoach, Wayne’s first noteworthy cinematic hit. A smart concept which made the most of the genre’s simplicity, Ford’s tale followed a group of people travelling by stagecoach who form a tight bond when pursuers complicate their journey. Relating the film to the later breadth of his own career, Wayne once reflected: “I love Stagecoach naturally because I stepped on that stagecoach, and it carried me a long way”.
The 1939 classic was certainly a significant film in the careers of both iconic talents, with Ford also going on to bigger and better things. Later becoming one of the most successful directors at the Academy Awards, the filmmaker won ‘Best Director’ for four different movies: 1936’s The Informer, 1941’s The Grapes of Wrath, 1942’s How Green Was My Valley and 1953’s The Quiet Man.
Yet, decades later, few of these films are as revered as his 1956 revisionist masterpiece The Searchers, which tells the story of an American Civil War veteran who sets out into the wilderness to save his niece from the ‘savage’ Indigenous Americans. However, what Wayne’s protagonist experiences, instead, is a violent assessment of his own prejudices and irreparable faults, walking on his lonesome into the setting sun at the end of the film.
Likely thanks to its subversive views, The Searchers never got the true credit it deserved at the time of its release, but as Wayne looked back on his career in 1977, he would name the film as his favourite western when listing his five most beloved movies of all time, alongside such other classics as Gone with the Wind and A Man for All Seasons.
Yet, when interviewed earlier in his stardom, Wayne also highlighted two westerns he considered to be better than Ford’s classic in Marc Eliot’s book American Titan: Searching for John Wayne. Asked whether The Searchers was Ford’s greatest genre effort, the actor replied, “No, I don’t. Two classic westerns were better – Stagecoach and Red River,” though he added, “The Searchers… deserved more praise than it got”.
Perhaps, by the end of his career, Wayne had gone through a similar character arc as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, reconsidering his own thoughts towards Ford’s movie, recognising the redemptive power behind its stone-faced eyes.
Picking your own movies feels like quite a thing in today’s media-trained age, but Wayne clearly saw no issue with naming three pictures in which he had starred as the greatest of the genre. Perhaps he simply believes they are the best or that, with the high number of movies in the genre he starred in, it was always likely that the best would feature his talents in some capacity. However, with Wayne’s past, it is more likely that he simply bought into the image America wanted a little too much and thought of himself as the country’s ultimate hero.
John Wayne’s favourite westerns:
- Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)
- The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
- Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
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