Actor: John Wayne

John Wayne made more than a hundred and fifty films and spent nine years in low-budget westerns before Stagecoach made him a star at thirty-two. The walk, the pause before a line and the way he held his shoulders were constructed deliberately and are still badly imitated.

The John Ford collaboration produced his best work, and The Searchers is the one that lasts because it uses the persona against itself. Ethan Edwards is a racist obsessive and the film knows it, ending with him framed in a doorway he cannot enter.

Red River, made for Howard Hawks, does something similar, and Montgomery Clift’s presence in it exposes how much Wayne’s stillness was technique and not limitation.

He won Best Actor for True Grit late, and his politics made him a lightning rod in his lifetime and since. The films are worth separating from the public figure, and The Searchers repays it.