John Wayne

Born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa on May 26, 1907, John Wayne became the defining screen presence of American cinema’s golden era. After early work as a prop handler and bit player at Fox, director Raoul Walsh cast him as the lead in The Big Trail (1930) — a wide-screen epic that flopped commercially but launched the on-screen persona he would spend five decades perfecting. The 1930s brought over 80 B-westerns for Monogram and Lone Star Pictures, churned out on impossibly small budgets but laying the foundation for everything that followed.

John Ford changed everything in 1939. Stagecoach transformed Wayne from a B-western fixture into a genuine movie star, and the Ford collaboration produced some of the greatest American films ever made: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers. Howard Hawks gave him his most relaxed, effortlessly cool roles — Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari! He finally won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1969 for True Grit, playing the one-eyed, hard-drinking Rooster Cogburn with gruff, self-aware charm. He made films until the year before his death in June 1979, logging 179 screen credits.

What to Look For

The pre-Stagecoach Monogram and Lone Star B-westerns are the hardest Wayne items to find in any format — many exist only in poor-quality public domain pressings on VHS and DVD. His 1940s Republic Pictures films (Flying Tigers, The Fighting Seabees, Sands of Iwo Jima) turn up in premium original VHS pressings worth hunting. On disc, the Criterion Collection Searchers Blu-ray, the Ford at Fox DVD set, and original Paramount pressings of True Grit command the most collector attention. Any sealed Wayne VHS tape, regardless of title, is worth picking up.