The five best John Wayne movies that aren’t westerns
To be a fan of John Wayne is to be a fan of westerns. The actor starred in dozens of them in his lifetime, spanning nearly the entirety of his five-decade career. But interspersed among The Big Trail and The Searchers and The Shootist, the star lent his talents to a handful of movies that had nothing to do with the genre.
Those who know Wayne’s filmography will be familiar with the many war movies he made. The actor was notoriously bullish about America’s involvement in foreign wars, and he was more than happy to provide his star power and money to lionise everything from the Battle of the Alamo to the Vietnam War.
In addition to the heavy-handed patriotism, however, there were other non-western movies that he starred in. Sure, he almost always played a veteran or a captain or a pilot, but that’s just how the Duke rolled. His tall stature and calm presence gave him an air of authority, and casting directors were all too eager to capitalise on it.
No matter how much you love westerns, there is no denying that Wayne did some of his best work when he took off his cowboy hat, hung up his spurs, and squinted toward a new horizon. Here are the five best examples of the star unencumbered by the symbolism of the Old West, from disaster movie melodramas to a passion project from his greatest collaborator.
The five best John Wayne movies:
5. The High and the Mighty (William A Wellman, 1954)
In the 1970s, disaster movies became big money. Chuck a bunch of ageing movie stars into a sinking ship or a burning skyscraper, and you have yourself a pot of gold waiting for you at the box office. But two decades before The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, The High and the Mighty posited its own early version of the genre.
Wayne stars as an airline co-pilot who has to take the wheel of a trans-Pacific flight when the engines fail and the pilot buckles under pressure. Starring an impressive cast including Claire Trevor, Laraine Day, and Robert Stack, it’s a tidy little setup for claustrophobic interpersonal melodrama and an early entry into the airline disaster genre.
It’s an ensemble cast rather than a vehicle for Wayne, but that’s to its advantage. He may be the hero of the story, but there are plenty of other character arcs to become engrossed in. The acting is turned up to 11, but if you’re in the mood for some well-executed Hollywood drama, it offers a satisfying deviation from the norm.
4. Donovan’s Reef (John Ford, 1963)
It’s striking just how many movies John Ford and John Wayne made together, especially considering how tough the director was on his biggest star. Ford’s direction, Wayne’s characters border on the three-dimensional and his minimalist approach to acting seems natural rather than underbaked.
Donovan’s Reef is a playful spin on their usual formula. Set in French Polynesia, it stars Wayne, Lee Marvin, and Jack Warden as three World War II expats living on the island of Haleakaloha. When Warden’s uptight daughter arrives from America to claim his shares in the family company, they band together to pretend that he hasn’t fathered three children with a woman from the island.
The obligatory antics ensue alongside a romantic plot, and while its plot machinations are predictable, Ford takes a much less racist approach to characters of colour than many Hollywood films did at the time, and the setting is a character unto itself. Of all the performances, Marvin’s stands out, and it’s worth watching the film just for him.
3. Reap the Wild Wind (Cecil B DeMille, 1942)
Cecil B DeMille is known for his biblical epics, a genre so excessive and of its time that they seem intentionally campy today. But his 1942 adventure movie with Wayne is understated by his standards, and are all the better for it. Set in the 1840s, Reap the Wild Wind stars Paulette Goddard as a woman who owns a marine salvage company in Key West, Florida. She falls in love with a ship captain, played by Wayne, but is torn between him and a wealthy suitor, played by Ray Milland, who owns the shipping line that employs him.
This film is notable for overextending its reach. Wayne and Milland don diving suits and are attacked by a giant squid at one point, and although, by 1942 standards, the special effects are astonishing (the movie won an Academy Award for them), they are charmingly outdated by today’s.
Reap the Wild Wind is as ambitious as any DeMille movie, but unlike his biblical epics, it’s a delightful watch rather than a punishing slog. Goddard gets a refreshingly independent role, and the interplay between Wayne and Milland’s characters is surprisingly nuanced.
2. The Longest Day (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Bernhard Wicki, 1962)
John Wayne’s views on America’s involvement in wars have not aged well, but one war-related film that he can be proud of is the D-Day epic The Longest Day. Featuring a stacked cast including Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, and Rod Steiger, the film was made with authenticity in mind and strove for historical accuracy by hiring actual participants in D-Day as consultants – Germans and Allies. It is also notable for the collaborative scale of its production, which involved three directors, four assistant directors, and five screenwriters.
Many of the A-listers in the cast, including Wayne, have small roles, but the parts were tailored to each star. Wayne plays Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Vandervoort of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, who breaks an ankle but continues to lead his men into battle using his rifle as a crutch. At three hours, it’s a hefty watch, but it’s a seminal instalment of the World War II genre and a gripping experience.
1. The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)
Of all the films Wayne made with Ford, The Quiet Man stands out as the most human-centred and lovingly wrought. Filmed in County Mayo and County Galway in his native Ireland, Ford poured his heart and soul into the project and cast locals as extras and Irish actors in supporting roles. It was the perfect vehicle for Irish star Maureen O’Hara, who had already starred in the Western Rio Bravo opposite Wayne and would go on to star with him in Ford’s The Wings of Eagles in 1957.
The Quiet Man follows an American named Sean Thornton (Wayne) who returns to the rural Irish town where he was born, hoping to start his life over. There, he meets and falls in love with a fiery local played by O’Hara, but the two face an uphill battle when her brother takes against Sean and wields his power as the head of the household to keep them apart. The film is full of beautiful cinematography, endearing characters, and crackling chemistry between Wayne and O’Hara. Sean’s shadowy history is revealed halfway through the film, providing an air of mystery to the plot.
Ford spotlights conservative small town values and marriage with a light touch and doesn’t idealise them the way other directors might have. It’s a highlight of Ford, Wayne, and O’Hara’s careers, and the best example of their alchemy as a collaborative trio.
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