Why 5 Classic John Wayne Movies Are Hard to Watch Today

John Wayne remains one of the most recognizable figures in film history, a towering Hollywood presence whose legacy is still debated decades after his death. But star power does not automatically make every title in an actor’s catalog timeless, and several of Wayne’s films have aged poorly when measured against modern expectations.

Born Marion Morrison, Wayne appeared in at least 185 screen projects between 1926 and 1976, building a career that stretched across five decades. With such a vast body of work, inconsistency was inevitable. Some films still hold up as defining entries in American cinema, while others reflect the biases, political anxieties, and cultural blind spots of the periods in which they were made.

The most difficult John Wayne movies to revisit today tend to fall into a few categories. Some are weighed down by blunt political messaging, others drift into outright propaganda, and several contain attitudes toward women, race, or foreign cultures that are deeply uncomfortable for contemporary viewers. Whatever the reason, these five John Wayne films are among the hardest to watch now.

Wayne’s staunchly conservative politics were no secret, and 1952’s “Big Jim McLain” may be one of the clearest on-screen expressions of that worldview. In the film, Wayne plays a House Un-American Activities Committee investigator sent to Hawaii to root out alleged communist influence, working alongside Mal Baxter, played by James Arness. Seen today, the movie is a grim time capsule of Cold War paranoia and is unlikely to appeal to anyone outside the most aggressively anti-“woke” corners of modern discourse.

To be fair, “Big Jim McLain” arrived during the earlier phase of McCarthyism, before the full extent of the movement’s damage to careers, reputations, and civil liberties had become impossible to ignore. Even so, it is startling now to watch Wayne positioned as the noble face of HUAC, one of the most infamous engines of political witch-hunting in modern American history, particularly when the film asks viewers to treat his character as an unquestioned hero.

John Huston’s 1958 drama “The Barbarian and the Geisha” is another Wayne vehicle that sits uneasily with modern audiences. The premise alone signals trouble: Wayne, operating in his familiar larger-than-life mode, plays Townsend Harris, an American diplomat sent to Japan during a period Hollywood often depicted through a haze of stereotypes. Casting Wayne as an official U.S. ambassador only heightens the cultural awkwardness.

As the story unfolds, Harris uses a mix of forceful confidence and supposed all-American charisma to win over skeptical locals, while drawing the interest of Okichi, played by Eiko Ando, a geisha initially tasked with spying on him. Yet the film is not quite the sweeping romantic adventure one might expect. It is surprisingly subdued, which only makes Wayne’s outsized screen persona feel more out of place.

There are hints that “The Barbarian and the Geisha” might have become a stronger film under different circumstances. Huston reportedly clashed with Wayne, later spoke dismissively of the finished work, and left before Wayne and the studio made changes to the movie. Still, whatever happened behind the scenes, the final result leaves Wayne looking badly miscast in a culturally dated drama that remains tough to sit through today.

“McLintock!” is one of John Wayne’s worst Western movies for many reasons. Apart from it simply not being very good, casting the unfunny actor in a comedy that draws inspiration from William Shakespeare’s misogyny-themed play “The Taming of the Shrew” makes it extra uncomfortable on two different fronts. The third swing and a miss comes from Wayne’s own behavior during filming. Wayne mistreated co-star Maureen O’Hara during filming, and happily recounted a time when she threw the non-consenting actress down a muddy hill in a 1976 episode of “Donahue” – all to show off in front of some hesitant stuntmen, apparently.

“I said, ‘Maureen, you ready?’ and she said, ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Get over there!'” Wayne said. “She got over there. I said, ‘Stick me with a hatpin!’ She did and I went ‘Wham!’ Down she went, cursing at me all the way down, and the stuntmen had to change the amount that they felt that stunt was worth.”

Wayne and O’Hara were on good terms in real life, and this particular incident didn’t seem to have hurt their relationship in the long run. Still, from a contemporary point of view, knowing what O’Hara went through during filming doesn’t score Wayne any “McLintock!”-themed brownie points — especially since O’Hara wrote in her memoir, “‘Tis Herself,” that a spanking scene in the movie was also legitimate and left her bruised for a week.

One of the many things you may not have known about John Wayne is that he made an infamous pro-Vietnam War movie despite many around him criticizing the conflict. Said film was 1968’s “The Green Berets,” and is far from one of the best Vietnam War movies out there.

The story behind “The Green Berets” is that the Pentagon provided the film with a vast amount of access to military bases and equipment. In exchange, the movie’s script was reworked into an uncomfortable propaganda machine that presented Colonel Mike Kirby’s (Wayne) titular special forces as the greatest people in the free world, while liberal reporter Beckworth (David Janssen) is a doofus who will eventually come to see the error of his anti-war ways. “Star Trek: The Original Series” star George Takei has the uncomfortable task of playing South Vietnamese Captain Nghiem, sprouting clipped, accented dialogue that backs the movie’s pro-American themes.

Full of pro-war ballyhoo and uncomfortable plot developments, “The Green Berets” was co-directed by Wayne and Ray Kellogg, and rightly panned by the critics. History hasn’t been any kinder to the movie, which shows that Wayne’s famous patriotism could be deeply flawed in the wrong hands.

John Wayne could be self-aware when he needed to be. The fact that the 1956 Howard Hughes epic “The Conqueror” was a biopic the actor genuinely regretted filming is proof of the actor’s ability to look back and shudder at certain career choices.

If “The Barbarian and the Geisha” miscast Wayne in the role of a diplomat navigating the sociopolitical divide between the U.S. and Japan, “The Conqueror” takes things to a completely other level by making him play the Mongol leader Temujin — also known as Genghis Khan. Yes, this is John Wayne in blatant yellowface, delivering his lines in his signature Western drawl in a movie that treats an entire culture and period of history with the sensitivity and nuance of a pro wrestling gimmick.

Wayne wasn’t the only person who recognized that “The Conqueror” was a misfire, incidentally. The film was a disaster at the box office, marking the end of Hughes’ association with the movie business. The mogul hated “The Conqueror” so much that he embarked on a painstaking mission to buy every copy of it. He also habitually rewatched “The Conqueror” himself during the reclusive stage of his life, perhaps as a type of self-induced “A Clockwork Orange”-style penance.