The 10 Worst John Wayne Movies Ranked

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It’s an understatement to say that John Wayne has a complicated legac, not only as an icon of American cinema but also as a figure who represents both the country’s rugged idealism and its deeply ingrained ugliness. He worked alongside some of Hollywood’s greatest performers, collaborated with the industry’s most esteemed directors, and starred in some truly great films.

But Wayne had his fair share of misfires and duds, too — entries that help paint a more comprehensive picture of his cinematic footprint. Some were early B-grade genre pictures churned out at a rapid pace with meager resources. Others more directly reflect the problematic political beliefs and personal prejudices that, now more than ever, tarnish his reputation. Wayne is the sum of his widely varying, often contradictory parts, and that includes his more regrettable output.

Here are the 10 worst John Wayne movies, ranked.

There’s an abundance of janky B-Westerns that John Wayne was a part of throughout the 1930s, produced and distributed by the likes of Republic Pictures and Monogram Pictures, studios that gained the “Poverty Row” designation due to their cheap productions made on quick timetables. A bunch of these movies could be interchangeable within the early positions of this list, but “The Telegraph Trail” gets a mention here due to its particularly shoddy production values and, surprise, crass depiction of Native Americans.

The film follows a trickster who incites a conflict by telling a local Native tribe that white developers are going to drive them off their land by installing telegraph lines, which causes them to revolt with an early-career Wayne caught in the middle. While it feels like it could offer a meaningful perspective on the volatile relationship between Natives and colonists if it were made with a modicum of introspection, instead, it’s a pretty straightforwardly dated genre picture where Wayne gets the girl at the end. At least it’s only 54 minutes.

After a while, many of Wayne’s early genre jaunts all just run together. It’s hard to imagine most people being able to immediately distinguish between “The Telegraph Trail” and “The Lawless Frontier,” or between “The Desert Trail” and this entry, “The Star Packer.” You get what you expect from “The Star Packer,” which is to say: an ultra-low-budget oater, admirable for a crew doing what they could with what they had in the early days of talkies, and maybe not admirable for much else. 

Would you be surprised to learn that this one is about Wayne running and gunning against outlaws in his new role as sheriff in a rough-and-tumble town? Oh, and that he saves the day and gets the girl? These movies scratch a certain itch in fulfilling all the reliable narrative tropes and aesthetic expectations you may look for when watching a B-Western, but it’d be a stretch to classify the lot of them as very good.

Despite his attempt to break out of Westerns, Wayne was putting out obligatory genre programmers pretty much all of his life, in between starring in genuinely great Western efforts that stand out as gems in a filmography that can seem fairly murky when looked at collectively. Maybe that’s why something like “Dakota” hurts a little worse after Wayne proved he has the capacity to lead films that are now classics of the genre. “Dakota” was released in a post–”Stagecoach” world, and sure enough, “Dakota” is no “Stagecoach.” To be fair, most movies aren’t, but “Dakota” is still forced to stand in stark contrast to Wayne in masterpiece mode versus when he’s working on autopilot. 

This Joseph Kane-directed film, one of approximately one million films the director made for Republic Pictures, pairs Wayne with Vera Ralston for a romance lacking much chemistry in a convoluted plot lacking much entertainment. The two get caught up in a plot regarding outlaws stealing the couple’s money in order to cash in on a land boom, as bad actors try to exploit the construction of the railroad to make some cash. Between Wayne sleepwalking through his role and the sedate sense of progression of the story, it’s easy to file “Dakota” within the doldrums of Wayne’s Republic Pictures days.

This additional entry of yet another Poverty Row Wayne western will be the last one on this list, and the lowest ranked for an egregiously personal and biased hang-up: the reliance on a saccharinely sweet mismatched relationship between the rough-n’-tumble Wayne and his cutesy young ward Nina (Shirley Jean Rickert). The right filmmaker can make this dynamic work, but “‘Neath the Arizona Skies” is no “Paper Moon.” 

This one was churned out by prolific B-movie craftsman Harry L. Fraser and embodies the main characteristic of Wayne’s career from this period as being the star of cookie-cutter rush productions. Wayne’s main mission here is to protect Nina from bandits out to get her due to her inheritance of an oil fortune, where the optics these days sort of look like his character is mostly out to protect her out of his own self-interest in being able to claim the fortune for himself. In case there was any doubt as to the approach of these productions being to mass-produce them to saturate the market, consider this is one of 13 productions Wayne led in 1934, and you’ll have an idea of the working philosophy taken by these low-rent films.

It’s always interesting when Wayne steps into a role outside the usual horseback-riding savior of American idealism in the West. Regular Wayne collaborator Andrew V. McLaglen instead casts the Duke as oil well firefighter Chance Buckman in “Hellfighters,” a globe-trotting disaster drama where Buckman travels the world extinguishing dangerous blazes — all while grappling with a divorce from his wife Madelyn (Vera Miles), who decided his high-risk lifestyle was too much to bear. Things get even more melodramatic when their daughter Tish (Katharine Ross) falls for another firefighter, Greg (Jim Hutton), whom Chance takes under his wing, in what feels like a misguided attempt to spare Tish the heartbreak her mother endured. 

The film’s emotional dynamics are all over the place, frequently clashing with its high-octane disaster set pieces. By the time our heroes are overseas getting help from the Venezuelan Army while under attack from rebel guerrillas — oh, and Madelyn and Tish are there, too — you’d be forgiven for not having a clue what exactly is going on.

“Rooster Cogburn” is often seen as a cash-in on two fronts: Not only is Wayne reprising his “True Grit” character to spark a useless franchise with the titular Cogburn, but the casting of Katharine Hepburn opposite him clearly aims to echo her dynamic with Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen.” To that end, “Rooster Cogburn” feels self-consciously shaped by a winking, almost insecure awareness, as if simply pairing two of the greatest stars of Old Hollywood in their twilight years and letting their personas spar for screen time would be enough to propel the whole film. It plays like an in-joke, but more than that, it just feels lazy on the part of Universal and producer Hal B. Wallis.

That laziness is perhaps best exemplified by the choice of director: Stuart Millar, an experienced producer but a novice filmmaker whose only previous directing credit suggests he was hired simply to get the thing over the finish line. As a forced sequel to one of Wayne’s more celebrated Westerns, “Rooster Cogburn” captures the kind of IP-driven thinking that would only become more dominant in Hollywood in the decades to follow.

On the particularly egregious end of uncharacteristic non-cowboy occupations Wayne has embodied in his films, the role of U.S. Consul General to Japan in “The Barbarian and the Geisha” stands out for the comedic value of his complete miscasting. Perhaps Wayne’s generally unchanged appearance and acting style –identical to nearly every other Wayne movie you’ve ever seen — was meant to underscore a larger cultural divide between him, as an American ambassador, and the mistrustful Japanese consulate. Regardless, it’s just kind of funny.

This John Huston-directed picture sees Wayne attempting to mend that cultural rift while falling in love with a geisha named Okichi (Eiko Ando), who, along with the rest of the Japanese embassy, eventually warms to him. After all, who can resist John Wayne and, by extension, America? Even after he burns down half a village to stop a cholera outbreak triggered by a ship he insisted be allowed to dock! In fairness to Huston, 20th Century Fox reportedly made heavy edits to the director’s original cut, leading him to practically disown the film, which he no longer recognized as his own. At least it unintentionally captures some kind of warped vision of American vulgarity and bravado.

“The Green Berets” carries the distinction of being both a poor star vehicle for the actor and an awful directorial effort, as one of just two films he ever helmed behind the camera (the other being the similarly lackluster “The Alamo,” which, unlike its namesake, no one is exactly urged to remember). Wayne co-directed the film with former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Ray Kellogg, a friend of John Ford who went on to work primarily as a visual effects artist in Hollywood following his military service. Based on the Robin Moore novel of the same name, the film carried a particular urgency upon its release in 1968, coming right in the thick of U.S. involvement in the years-long Vietnam quagmire. Wayne was motivated by his unease with the growing anti-war sentiment in America, and he even sought out support from President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Department of Defense, which is how the government helped shape this controversial film.

With all that context, you can probably guess that “The Green Berets” isn’t just bad because of its shoddy production values, though there’s plenty of that here. No, it’s mainly bad because of its obscenely negligent approach to portraying one of the most complicated military conflicts in modern history. Rather than offering any semblance of nuance, it functions as a true-blue hoo-rah propaganda piece about how American troops kick ass and are sticking it to those lousy communists. 

Wayne was never exactly known for a delicate grasp of politics or for entertaining anything resembling left-wing ideals — for example, a Fox exec once shut down John Wayne’s xenophobia on the set of The Longest Day” — but “The Green Berets” might be the crowning example of hard-headed, vulgar American jingoism. As Roger Ebert wrote in his scathing review, “‘The Green Berets’ simply will not do as a film about the war in Vietnam.”

There’s a real argument to be made that the Edward Ludwig-directed “Big Jim McLain” is Wayne’s most insufferable piece of right-wing agitprop. When your movie plays like it was personally funded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (AKA HUAC, America’s fear-mongering, civil-rights-abusing state police who operated from 1938 until their slow dissolution in the late 1950s), it’s hard to muster an inspired rebuttal.

Wayne plays an investigator from HUAC who heads to Hawaii with fellow officer Mal Baxter (James Arness) to uncover and stop suspicious commie activity — activity that is definitely real and happening, and thank God we have our beautiful American patriot John Wayne to ensure our flawless national ideals aren’t being undermined. It’s pure Red Scare nonsense, the offshoot effects of which we’re still feeling today, thanks to ongoing right-wing efforts to slap the labels “socialist” or “communist” on anything remotely progressive. Think of every person who blames all of America’s problems on some vague notion of “woke,” and that’s essentially the worldview Wayne’s character operates under here: He can fix everything, if only we can snuff out these nasty communist ideologies — ideologies that somehow mean both everything and nothing.

There’s a reason everyone seems to agree that “The Conqueror” is the worst John Wayne movie. This Dick Powell-directed historical epic was Howard Hughes’ final production and regularly appears on lists of the worst films of all time, with much of the blame falling squarely on Wayne himself. The Duke lobbied hard for the lead role after reading and enjoying the script. The only problem is that the script is set in the 12th-century Mongol Empire, and the role Wayne was gunning for was none other than Mongol chief Temujin, better known as Genghis Khan. 

You know what that means: insane racial insensitivity that radiates from Wayne in one of the worst mis-castings of all time, compounded by the film’s clueless visualization of Mongolia. There’s a total disinterest in making this film even remotely accurate to the period it depicts, and it’s otherwise woefully dry and stagey, especially for an epic that’s supposed to feel big and exciting.

And yet, the film’s poor quality and blatant orientalism play second fiddle to the main reason it’s remembered today: “The Conqueror” left a tragic legacy by purportedly giving a bunch of people who worked on it cancer. This includes Wayne, who had a case of lung cancer by 1964 and died of stomach cancer in 1979. It was later found that 41% of the crew had developed some form of cancer following production, which took place in areas of Utah affected by nearby nuclear test site locations that the U.S. government assured the filmmakers were safe. No concrete scientific study ever definitively proved the link, but it’s not a stretch to draw the connection when nearly half a film crew contracts a deadly disease after shooting around nuclear fallout. 

“The Conqueror” is remembered less as a movie than as a tragic case of negligence by multiple parties, one that led to the undue health complications and the untimely deaths of an unknowing film crew.