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My Five Favorite John Wayne Films (Plus One)
You can’t go wrong with these movies from the Duke
When I was growing up, if there was one iconic hero who towered over the American landscape it was John Wayne. This was long before we were inundated with social media influencers (sorry Simon Dillon, there’s no other word I can use) and billions of hours of “content” on streaming sites and YouTube, when we had only three television channels and film stars were still bigger than musicians or sports figures could ever be. The Beatles were huge and everyone in America knew Jets quarterback Joe Namath, yet even they saw being in movies as the summit of the entertainment mountain.
I’ve written on numerous occasions that my idol as a child was Steve McQueen, yet even the King of Cool never came close to the cultural impact of the Duke. I wanted McQueen’s bomber jacket and motorcycle from The Great Escape partly because I knew those were achievable goals that might, in some small way, make me cool like him. I never held such illusions that a cowboy hat and boots could make me anything like Wayne.
Wanting to be like John Wayne was, simply put, a bridge too far. It was like telling my mom I wanted to grow up to be Jesus; she would have wondered if I’d suffered a serious head injury. That’s because though he was held up as the epitome of…
