It’s all John Wayne all the time! Johns Ford and Wayne are forever linked in movie history, but The Duke also made five films – four of them Westerns – with the great Howard Hawks. Their first collaboration was
Red River following a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas co-starring Montgomery Clift and Walter Brennan. While there are some external conflicts including some Injuns the main source of drama comes from the relationship between Wayne and Clift’s characters, noted by critic Tim Dirks to be a sort of riff on
Mutiny on the Bounty’s Captain Bligh/Fletcher Christian dynamic on the high plains instead of the high seas. For one of the first times in his career Wayne plays a flawed and sometimes even unlikeable character, at least in comparison to the movie star turns he had been enjoying since
Stagecoach began entrenching his screen persona. John Ford is noted to have said, “I never knew the big son of a bitch could act” after seeing Wayne in the picture and supposedly gave him the courage to think of darker more complicated roles for The Duke in his films. With gorgeous black and white cinematography by Russell Harlan and music by Dimitri Tiomkin
Red River yee-hawed its way onto nine MoFo ballots including an eighth and a tenth place. It finished with the same 86-point total as
The Shootist but by virtue of it being on one more ballot it rises one spot higher on our countdown.
The 1980s was a rare fallow period for movie Westerns with a relatively small number being produced in the decade, so if you were eight or ten or fifteen in 1990 it is quite likely your first experience seeing a Western on the big screen may have been
Back to the Future Part III. What a kid who wasn’t very well versed in the genre wouldn’t have known is how much fun Bob Zemeckis and company had in taking the conclusion of their time travel adventure to very much a movie version of the Old West. At the end of
Part II after Marty secures the sports almanac from the 1955 timeline to restore 1985 back to some semblance of what it was (at least at the end of the first flick) Doc Brown and the Delorean get accidentally zapped back a hundred years and get stuck in 1885. As Marty and 1985 Doc ready to send him way back they head to an abandoned Drive-In with a Western mural. When he arrives we discover Hill Valley, CA is located right in Monument Valley, UT!
While they physically filmed there more importantly this represents the Monument Valley of John Ford and dozens of cinematic Westerns. From there on we get reference after reference to specific movies as well as the genre at large synthesized through decades of cinema and television. After planting the seed with casino Biff and Marty watching the finale of Leone’s
A Fistful of Dollars on television in
Part II, the young time traveler models himself as a pop/meta version of The Man with No Name calling himself Clint Eastwood complete with poncho. In addition to all of the
Back to the Future regulars as their ancestral selves we get the likes of Dub Taylor, Matt Clark, Harry Carey Jr., Pat Buttram, Bill McKinney, and Richard Dysart as the movie Western faces in this movie Western town. Plus Mary Steenburgern’s Jules Vern fan of a school marm as Doc’s love interest.
Back to the Future Part III earned 87 points. I REALLY thought about fudging the numbers to get it to 88 and see if it would vanish in a flash and flames, but I left it at the less fun 87 (though there are a verified 1.21 gigawatts). Those not-quite-88 points came from seven votes including a pair of fourth placers.
The Sons of Katie Elder, North to Alaska, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Shootist, Red River, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and Pale Rider