Discover John Wayne’s Most Underrated Western You Need to See!

During the 1940s, John Wayne was already a Hollywood icon, yet World War II had largely cut off Europe from American cinema, leaving many of his films from that era undiscovered until years later. This month, the publisher Sidonis Calysta has re-released one such film, and it’s a western!

John Wayne as a Professional Deceiver

With his breakout role in “Stagecoach” in 1939, John Wayne proved he was a talented actor with significant box office appeal. He rose to stardom and between 1940 and 1948, he starred in about twenty films, including only a few westerns, among them “Dakota,” also known as “The Pioneer’s Wife.”

The movie starts off as a social comedy with Sandy (played by then-star Vera Ralston) marrying John (John Wayne) without telling her father, a railroad magnate. What follows is a rather humorous chase, which gradually transitions into a western setting as John and Sandy decide to settle in the state of Dakota, a land brimming with opportunities for a business-savvy young couple.

All His Friends Are Here

In “The Pioneer’s Wife,” John Wayne takes the lead and is joined by his friends: Walter Brennan, whom he had met on two westerns with Tim McCoy in 1932 and would reunite with in “Rio Bravo,” as well as Ward Bond (a John Ford regular), and Grant Withers, a close friend with whom he had recently worked on “A Man Betrayed” and “In Old California” (1943), as well as “The Fighting Seabees” (1944).

The film explores how extreme greed can trample individual freedom. Businessmen try to swindle the farmers into selling their land at dirt-cheap prices, aiming to become the owners of vast tracts of land that will be worth a fortune once the railroad reaches Dakota. The conflict between the two sides culminates in a dramatic and tragic fire scene with farmers fleeing their burning fields.

Wayne plays a character with a somewhat shady past—he’s a habitual gambler, brawler, and generally irreverent—but who, when faced with true injustice, turns into a chivalrous knight, fearless and without reproach, a role he would come to play often later on. “The Pioneer’s Wife” remains an intriguing curiosity directed by the uneven Joseph Kane, who that same year directed another lesser-known western with Wayne, “Flame of Barbary Coast.” This film, too, has been released by Sidonis Calysta.