The Big Picture
- John Wayne’s prolific career as a leading man was largely due to his association with Westerns.
- The abundance of Western films produced during the 1930s to 1950s allowed Wayne to quickly churn out leading roles, boosting his career stats.
- Wayne’s career was further bolstered by his decision to stay in America during World War II, allowing him to continue acting while other actors were overseas. The post-war era’s fear of communism also made him an ideal leading man as he represented a conservative and patriotic image.
Today, many lead actors pride themselves on scarcity. Leonardo DiCaprio, Sandra Bullock, and Denzel Washington have emerged as the rare movie stars in modern pop culture partially because they don’t inundate audiences with new movies. These performers can take years off in between movies and make people’s hearts grow fonder for their presence. Whenever they show up in a new motion picture (so long as it isn’t J. Edgar or Our Brand is Crisis), it’s a must-see event for the general public. Still, that’s not the only way to carve out a movie star persona. Just ask John Wayne, the man who has the record for the most leading parts in one actor’s filmography.
Through a career that spanned from 1926 to 1976, John Wayne was a constant fixture of the silver screen who didn’t even have to wait too long for his first leading role. In 1930, after four years of work as an extra or supporting performer, Wayne headlined The Big Trail and never stopped anchoring major motion pictures. Over his entire career, he’d take on 142 leading roles, a remarkable achievement that makes it clear why Wayne’s presence still looks so large over cinema as a whole. There are a lot of factors behind why Wayne was able to take on so many lead parts in his lengthy career, some obvious, and some that are a bit more complicated than one might expect. Saddle up partner, it’s time to explore how and why John Wayne is the most prolific leading man in the history of American film.
John Wayne and Westerns, an Inseparable Pairing
When you think of John Wayne, you think of Westerns. The man and the genre are forever linked, the world of plains and tumbleweeds eternally affixed to Wayne’s silver screen persona. Of course, Wayne didn’t just headline Westerns as a leading man, thanks to roles in titles firmly set in the-then-modern world like The High and the Mighty or his infamous turn as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. However, there’s no denying that John Wayne was most famous for his work in movies where he’d put on a cowboy hat and saunter across largely empty terrain. Inhabiting this genre is already a big reason why Wayne was able to score so many more leading man roles than the average actor.
In a helpful piece of data from B-Western, one can see the gargantuan number of Westerns Hollywood was making annually from the 1930s to the 1950s. Years like 1935 could produce as many as 148 Westerns while 1950 saw the genre make a big comeback with 134 entries. To produce this many titles, many of these Westerns were produced quickly and efficiently. Actors didn’t need to be around for six or so months — these movies could be finished at a rapid pace so that audience demand could be met. In the 1930s, Wayne boosted up his stats as a leading man by headlining many of these quickly churned-out Westerns like The Dawn Rider and Lawless Range. Heck, in 1935, the peak year for the American Western, Wayne headlined 8 movies, a little over 5% of his entire leading man career.
While Wayne, in the wake of the 1939 hit Stagecoach, would eventually transform him into an A-list leading man, his stint as a star of cheapie Westerns in the 1930s is heavily responsible for his deluge of starring gigs. Later on in his career, Wayne used his persona as the default Western star to become a fixture of the genre, particularly when it came to movies directed by John Ford. His association with the world of Westerns certainly made John Wayne a viable candidate for being a go-to leading man in the genre, but that’s not the only reason this actor was able to claim over 140 leading man roles to his name.
John Wayne’s Career Was Bolstered by World War II and Patriotism
In the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, big-name American actors leaped into the military fray and signed up to fight in World War II. Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and so many others went out into the war, but John Wayne didn’t. Wayne stayed behind in America, which meant that he could add more leading man roles to his filmography while other actors were overseas. While there’s a noticeable five-year gap in acting credits in Jimmy Stewart’s career between 1941 and 1946, Wayne headlined two movies in 1943 alone and another four in 1945. While it’s not like Wayne was able to anchor 100+ movies during World War II, there’s no denying that being able to continue acting while his contemporaries went off to fight in the war gave him a leg up as a leading man in terms of sheer quantity.
Something else that bolstered the presence of John Wayne as a leading man in the 1950s onward, though, was a much darker phenomenon. In the aftermath of World War II, fear-mongering about the presence of communism in America became omnipresent, including concerns over Hollywood being “infested” with leftists. The HUAC committee held infamous hearings revolving around the political allegiances of Hollywood legends, which sent the film industry scrambling to make sure its works came off as patriotic, not subversive. What better leading man to function as the face of a new era of American cinema that was not at all communist than a guy who would eventually release an album of poetry entitled “America, Why I Love Her”?
Wayne would almost certainly have headlined major movies throughout the 1950s thanks to his box office and critical track record. However, his staunch attitude against communism made him an ideal leading man for an era of Hollywood that was terrified of being viewed as sympathetic to leftist tendencies. The tragedy here is that Hollywood, in the process of avoiding some communist boogeyman, enabled a man who used his power to spread racist rhetoric and merely uphold the societal status quo. Wayne’s films didn’t challenge systemic structures or authority, they were instead endlessly loyal to those entities. After all, they enabled him as a cis-het white guy to have a lot of power. Why would he question them?
That’s the darkest element of why John Wayne has more leading man roles than any other American actor: viewers and studio executives alike enjoyed the way his movies reinforced the norms of the world. Wayne was a physical manifestation of classical masculinity whose movies revolved around him putting women, people of color, and other marginalized voices “back into their place.” Audiences clamored for more movies in this vein and Hollywood was all too happy to supply them. In the process, John Wayne got to headline 140+ movies, many of which utilized rhetoric and imagery meant to titillate the most privileged viewers with a disturbing vision of how the world “should” be. John Wayne got to be a leading man with an unmatched presence in Hollywood for many reasons. However, it’s hard to deny that a key reason for his ubiquity, as with many other American movie stars, is that his movies didn’t challenge people or the status quo.
