When Ethan Wayne misses his father, he need only insert “Wake of the Red Witch” or “Reap the Wild Wind” into his DVD player to see his pappy back in his prime. Growing up the son of John Wayne has its advantages. Watching “The Comancheros,” his father’s 1962 Western hit, holds another blast from the family past.

“I get to see my dad around the time that I came about,” the 49-year-old Ethan Wayne says.

John Wayne at home with kids Ethan, Marissa, and Aissa and wife Pilar.

“The Comancheros,” out this week on Blu-ray, stars John Wayne as a Texas Ranger assigned to bring in a man (Stuart Whitman) charged with killing a judge’s son. The infraction actually occurred during a duel, lending the character’s sin some shading. The two men end up reluctant allies when they square off against a band of outlaws who smuggle guns to a local Comanche tribe.

Ethan Wayne, an actor and stunt man in his own right, says his father regaled him with on-set stories from “The Comancheros.” The western icon bonded with some of his “Comancheros” co-stars, like Lee Marvin and Bruce Cabot.

“It was a group of contemporaries who came up through the ranks [together],” he says.

Wayne recalls a more somber side of his father’s “Comancheros” stories, one involving the film’s celebrated director, Michael Curtiz  of “Casablanca” fame.

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As they have annually since 1994, in January of this year, Harris Interactive conducted a poll that surveys a sample of 2300 adults across the country with a very simple question: “Who is your favorite movie star?” Ranking as number three this year (up from seven last year) was the only actor to make the list every year since its inception and the only actor to make it posthumously: John Wayne. Nearly thirty-two years after his death, the Duke still captures the American imagination in a way no other actor or movie star ever has or ever will.

The reasons for this are legion. First and foremost, Wayne was a second-to-none screen presence. There aren’t many actors who could blow the likes of Lee Marvin, Kirk Douglas, Montgomery Clift, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda or John Ford’s wonderful collection of character actors off the screen — but Wayne could without moving a muscle. He also personified the flawed but sympathetic hero, the loner who lived by a simple code and was rarely welcomed into the civilization that wouldn’t have been possible without his violence. And finally, John Wayne was one of the greatest actors to ever grace the silver screen; the rare movie star who not only possessed range, but also a bottomless emotional depth in his well-known screen persona.  There will never be another John Wayne and that I have lived long enough to see our critical community finally (and in some cases, grudgingly) come to terms with that means more to me than I can express.

Something else the Duke did very, very right – again, better than any other movie star – was to make one damn fine film after another. After toiling away in quickie Westerns for over a decade, Wayne finally became a star portraying the Ringo Kid (greatest character introduction ever) in John Ford’s unqualified 1939 masterpiece “Stagecoach.” From there he never looked back or stopped working straight through to his fitting final role as a dying gunfighter in “The Shootist” (1976). In-between, though, he starred in nearly 80 films, a canon of work that – at least to us Wayne fans – contains surprisingly few clunkers.

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Toward the end of the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the picture’s director, Victor Fleming, was suddenly called away to salvage another production that was careening off-track at the studio, Gone with the Wind. The “Oz” portions of the movie, filmed in spectacular Technicolor, were already finished. But the “Kansas” sequences bookending the picture — including the all-important scene showing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on her Depression-era farm — had yet to be shot.

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”?  If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

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Last week, I stirred some folks up with my Top Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time.  To recap, they were: Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, David Lean, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Nichols, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Alfred Hitchcock.  And by “stirred some folks up,” I mean faced down a virtual lynch mob.  Who knew that Aronofsky supporters were fans of the film Fury? 

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections: (more…)