I can't remember the first movie I ever saw, but I've loved going to the movies since childhood. I say 'going to the movies' because I'm a firm believer in experiencing movies where they were designed to be seen: in a theater, sitting among an audience of strangers, on a big screen, the images larger than life, in a darkness lit only by the movie, with coke and a popcorn. I became friends with the famous movie critic/writer Roger Ebert when I created and produced a movie review show for a rock and roll radio station in Chicago. Later he convinced me to write captions for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.
In his wonderful anthology about movies, Roger Ebert's Book of Film, he quotes in his introduction to movies, a memorable passage from Walker Percy’s novel, The Moviegoer. It sums up why movie lovers love movies, and why most still remember John Wayne:
“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
I came across a column Roger Ebert did about John Wayne today:
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/shall-we-gather-at-the-river
The Searchers is in my top ten movies of all time...maybe in the top five. But, then again, there's Red River, Donovan's Reef, The Cavalry Trilogy, and The Quiet Man. I didn't like his True Grit, but loved the Coen Brothers version, and thought it should have won the Best Picture Oscar. Alas, it was inexplicably given to an already forgotten, mediocre, Masterpiece Theater quality movie: The King's Speech.
Of course, John Wayne's reputation was damaged by his support for the Vietnam War, his terrible later movies, and his alliance with Nixonian politics. But, he was capable of greatness, like this scene from John Ford’s masterpiece, The Quiet Man:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkQyRE0byBI
And, a week doesn't go by during which I don't work in one of his memorable lines of dialogue into my dialogues on most things:
"That'll be the day."
If you’ve never seen him at his best: Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Thomas Dunson in Red River, any of the cavalry officers in the Cavalry Trilogy, or Sean Thornton in The Quiet Man you may not know what I’m writing about.
But, in an era where all movies are available all the time (even if they can't be watched on a big screen in a real movie theater) you could be watching a very young, incredibly handsome John Wayne standing by himself in the middle of a dirt road spinning the Winchester rifle Ebert describes in his column, saddle over his shoulder, dressed in buckskins, becoming a star in John Ford's 1939 movie, Stagecoach, right before your eyes, tonight.