Ten John Wayne Films to Watch With Your Son, in Order

Start with True Grit. Not The Searchers.

Every dad who wants to hand down the Duke reaches for the masterpiece first, and every time the kid checks out somewhere around minute forty of a bleak revenge story he has no context for. The Searchers is the better film. True Grit is the better door. Get him through the door.

What follows is ten films in the order I'd actually run them, with the content flagged plainly so nobody's fast-forwarding on the fly. Most of these predate the ratings board entirely. The violence is real but almost never gory, the language is mild by any modern standard, and there's nothing in this whole run that you'd have to apologize for on the couch. The things worth a conversation are different things, and I'll name those too.

1. True Grit (1969, about 2h 8m)

Wayne's only Oscar, and he earned it by playing a fat, one-eyed, half-drunk deputy who takes a fourteen-year-old girl's money and then, grudgingly, keeps his word. Kim Darby's Mattie Ross runs the movie. She out-argues every adult she meets.

Rated G on release, which tells you something about how the scale has slid. There's shooting, a hanging early on, a snake pit, and Rooster's drinking is a running joke that the movie doesn't entirely let him off the hook for. Good from about eleven.

The talking point afterward isn't the gunfight. It's that a man of bad habits still had a code, and a girl who'd never handled a horse held him to it.

2. Rio Bravo (1959, about 2h 21m)

Howard Hawks reportedly made this because he hated High Noon and thought a professional wouldn't run around begging townsfolk for help. So Sheriff John T. Chance holds a jail with a recovering drunk, an old man with a bad leg, and a kid who's better with a rifle than with people.

It's long and it's leisurely and it's one of the warmest movies ever made about men doing a job. Dean Martin's Dude has the real arc: a man clawing his way back from the bottle, hands shaking, trying to be worth something again. Watch the scene where he pours the whiskey back into the bottle without spilling a drop.

Clean throughout. Shootouts, a saloon brawl. Fine from ten or so, though younger kids will drift during the singing.

3. Stagecoach (1939, about 1h 36m)

The one that made him a star after nine years of poverty-row junk. Nine strangers in a coach through Apache country, and John Ford lets each one show you exactly what he's made of under pressure.

Two flags. The Apaches are scenery, not people, which is a fair thing to say out loud to your son rather than pretend otherwise. And Dallas is a woman being run out of town by the respectable ladies for her reputation, which the film handles with complete discretion and never depicts. The point is that the "respectable" passengers are the worst people on board.

The stunt where Yakima Canutt goes under the galloping team is still the most dangerous thing in any Western.

4. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949, about 1h 43m)

Wayne was forty-one, playing a cavalry captain of sixty-odd with six days until mandatory retirement, and he's astonishing. Winton Hoch's Technicolor photography won the Oscar, and the thunderstorm sequence he shot over Ford's objections is the reason.

This is the quietest film on the list and the one most worth showing a son who's about to leave home. Captain Brittles talks to his dead wife at her grave every evening. He tries to solve his last problem without a battle. He hands the job to men younger than he'd like.

His famous line is "never apologize, it's a sign of weakness." The movie spends two hours showing you the places where that advice fails him.

5. Red River (1948, about 2h 13m)

The father-son film, and it doesn't flatter the father. Tom Dunson builds an empire out of nothing and then drives ten thousand head up the Chisholm Trail with a cruelty that turns his own adopted son against him. Montgomery Clift, in his first released picture, plays Matt as the man who finally says no.

Hard stuff here: Dunson orders floggings, shoots men, threatens to hang two. Nobody's a cartoon villain. That's what makes it land.

Best around thirteen or fourteen. If your boy's ever thought you were unreasonable, this is a two-hour conversation you don't have to start.

6. They Were Expendable (1945, about 2h 15m)

Ford shot this right after his own war service, and it's a film about losing. PT boat crews in the Philippines in 1942, doing everything right, and retreating anyway. Robert Montgomery, a genuine PT veteran, carries it. Wayne plays the hothead who wants a real command.

No triumph at the end. Men are left behind on a beach because there's no room on the plane, and the camera doesn't soften it. That's the lesson: sometimes duty looks like holding a position you already know you'll lose.

Combat violence, wounded men, deaths off and on screen. Twelve and up.

7. The Quiet Man (1952, about 2h 9m)

Ford's Ireland, and the only picture on this list your wife will want to rewatch more than you do. Wayne is an American boxer who's quit fighting for a reason he won't say, and Maureen O'Hara is a woman who won't be managed.

Say the awkward part up front: there's a scene where he drags her across a field, played for comedy in 1952 and plainly not funny now, plus a brawl that runs most of a reel and a great deal of drinking. It's also, underneath all that, a serious movie about a marriage where two stubborn people have to learn each other's terms. Watch it with your son when he's sixteen and let him hear you say what you'd do differently.

8. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, about 2h 3m)

Shot in black and white on a soundstage when Ford could easily have gone wide and gorgeous, and the flat, closed-in look is the whole idea. James Stewart brings law books to a town that runs on force. Wayne owns the force.

Lee Marvin's Valance beats a man with a whip in one genuinely unpleasant scene. Nothing graphic. It's just mean, which is the point.

The last act asks whether a civilization can be founded on a lie it tells about itself. Fifteen and up, and be ready to pause it.

9. The Searchers (1956, about 1h 59m)

Now you can run it. Ethan Edwards spends five years hunting his abducted niece, and it slowly becomes clear he may intend to kill her rather than bring her home.

The racial hatred in this film is Ethan's, and the film indicts him for it. The massacre is entirely off screen. Wayne plays a man you admire and can't like, and he never once asks you to forgive him. The final shot of that doorway is the most famous image in American film for a reason.

Sixteen and up. Talk about it afterward or don't bother.

10. The Shootist (1976, about 1h 40m)

His last picture. He plays a gunfighter dying of cancer in Carson City in 1901, and Wayne himself had already lost a lung to it and would die of it three years later. James Stewart plays the doctor who gives him the news.

Rated PG. A short, ugly gunfight at the end, and a boy, played by Ron Howard, who's been watching the legend up close all week.

Watch what that kid does in the last thirty seconds. Then look over at your son and see whether he got it. He will.