I remember seeing John Wayne's last public appearance. It was the Oscars show in 1979, and he announced the best picture winner. (It was The Deer Hunter.) You could see that he wasn't long for this world.
John Wayne died that June, when my parents and I were visiting Britain. They showed some of his movies on British TV, as they sometimes do after a movie legend dies. (They did the same with William Holden a couple of years later.) That's where I first saw True Grit and Stagecoach, the movie that made him a big star. Stagecoach isn't just a great western, it has a great romance between him and Claire Trevor.
One of my favourite westerns is The Searchers, directed by John Ford and starring Wayne. (They made a lot of great westerns together, including Stagecoach.) He plays a man whose niece gets captured by Comanches, who pursues them in an obsessive quest for over a decade, and turns into something of a monster: will he rescue his niece or kill her for living the Indian life? It's one of the rare westerns with a sense of tragedy. There's a great closing shot where an indoor camera sees him outdoors, framed by a door, and the door closes on him! I've seen it half a dozen times.
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