"Do ya feel lucky, punk?"

You probably can't imagine these lines coming from anyone but the iconic Clint Eastwood. But it turns out that a whole Rolodex of Hollywood's finest leading men came _this_ close to portraying Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan of the SFPD.

Frank Sinatra. John Wayne. Robert Mitchum. Steve McQueen. Burt Lancaster. George C. Scott. Paul Newman. Each of them passed, for…

For decades, "The Duke" defined the Western genre. He played stoic, unflappable lawmen and cowboys in cinematic landmarks like _The Searchers_ and _Stagecoach_. And John Wayne delivered some of the most memorable lines out there.

But yesterday, I talked about a line from The Green Berets that I felt didn't work so werll given the context of the film and the year it came out.

We got some…

We've been covering a lot of John Wayne here lately. That kind of happens when you do one article on a legend and then have to dive into the movies that made them.

Well, Wayne was the prototype for American Westerns and cowboy movies.

But when he stepped out of that genre, his persona didn't walk away from the real world of his other movies.

One memorable time was his starring role in _The…

I think it's hard to really understand what a grip the Western genre had on America in the 1950s. We've joked that they were basically their superhero movies of the time, but it does kind of feel like all culture revolved around them.

Even rock and roll.

Case in point, in John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece, _The Searchers_ , John Wayne didn't just deliver a great performance; he gave us a line…

For over four decades, the man who would become known to Western lovers as "The Duke" was the human embodiment of the American frontier and the Western movie genre.

There's not much left to say about John Wayne except for the fact that he totally lived up to the legend his characters wrote for him.

The guy had a particular way about him that allowed his personality to seamlessly transition…

I'm not sure there's an actor synonymous with one genre the way John Wayne is with Westerns. He spent decades defining the genre, playing stoic heroes in cinematic landmarks like _The Searchers_ and _Stagecoach_.

There is no American myth without him, and despite a complicated legacy, he is one of Hollywood's biggest stars ever.

And despite carrying the Western genre on his back for nearly…

John Wayne was a pillar of the Western, and his career sort of traces the rise and fall of the genre. By 1976, both Wayne and the western were dying.

The Western was torn apart by the cynical, gritty "New Hollywood" movement. And Wayne was battling the cancer that would kill him.

He entered the year giving what I think is his best performance in The Shootist, where he plays a dying…

If you grew up thinking Westerns were just about "white hats" and "black hats" shooting it out in the dirt, you haven't seen _The Searchers_.

Released in 1956, this John Ford epic didn't just redefine a genre; it essentially became the North Star for the guys who built modern Hollywood.

When the American Film Institute (AFI) updated its 100 Years... 100 Movies list, _The Searchers_ climbed…