The John Wayne Project

I love John Wayne movies. A lot. I blame my parents. :) Some of my fondest childhood memories are of our family's Friday night John Wayne parties. We'd each pick a movie, write it on a slip of paper, and throw it into the Tonka Cement Mixer. We'd spin the drum and whatever slip of paper came out first was the one we'd watch. 9 times out of 10 I would write down The War Wagon. It drove Jennifer nuts. And to this very day she still hates that movie. (But can you blame her?! I played the annoying little sister role really well when I wanted to, haha!)

But my love for John Wayne is not based solely on nostalgia. I also love what he stood for. And what the characters he played stood for. Truth. Justice. Courage. Liberty. America. Fighting for what you believe in. Integrity. Chivalry.

John Wayne was in at least 172 movies. And I haven't seen nearly enough of them. Today I begin a project to remedy that. To start off, I've decided to focus my efforts on 50 films beginning with Stagecoach from 1939 and ending with The Shootist from 1976, as chronicled in the book John Wayne in the Movies: A Retrospective. I don't plan on watching them in any particular order since it'll take some time to track them down either online or at the library. Needless to say, this project should keep me pretty busy for awhile! But what I'm hoping is that I'll find some new ones to add to my already robust collection of John Wayne movies. (One can never own to many, right?) So stay tuned. I'll let you know what I think of each one of them.