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Go on Wayne watch via the AFI Movie Club—a classic movie extravaganza!
Written by Jenn Thornton
Decades after he departed the stage as America’s biggest and most bankable film star—a stature he enjoyed for the bulk of his long and shining career—John Wayne is being seen anew, and sometimes for the first time, by legions of film fans via the AFI Movie Club.
Started during the pandemic by the American Film Institute, the Club was meant to bring isolated moviegoing audiences together; today it is one of the world’s biggest watch parties.
Comprised of film-related clips from its glittering archive, AFI Movie Club later launched the daily movie-guessing game Get the Picture (warning: it’s addictive) to go along with its cinematic treasures and famed best-of lists. Among AFI’s most prized and perused content is the Robert Osborne Collection—an esteemed collection of classic films, including John Wayne favorites The Quiet Man (1952) and The Searchers (1956)—introduced by the late Osborne himself, the GOAT of Hollywood talking heads.
For the consistent scrollers among us, AFI’s Movie Club is a 24/7 affair. With hours of digital content literally at your fingertips, get some popcorn and put your feet up because crashing this club means sifting-and-clicking in huge blocks of time. Red-carpet interviews, famous movie scenes, awards speeches, late-night walk-ons, actors dishing on other actors and everything in between, there is more movie content here than mere mortals could possibly want.
But as John Wayne fans can never get enough, the AFI archive has something special for you, too. Given the breadth of the actor’s decades-long career, it is a palooza of not only Duke as characters you know and love, but also the man about Hollywood. Taking fans behind the scenes, here is John Wayne on John Ford directing Stagecoach (1939). Another clip has eminent director Steven Spielberg referring to Ford as an inspiration while singling out the Ford/Wayne collaborations Stagecoach and The Searchers. From film to fanfare, even rugged John Wayne liked to gussy up from time to time and hit the awards circuit. In this clip, Duke salutes Jimmy Cagney at the AFI: Life Achievement Award tribute in 1974.
Elsewhere on YouTube, the highbrow Criterion Collection is another great resource for true film aficionados, offering clips of classic and cult-favorite films, along with some truly amazing outtakes and rare if never-before-seen commentary by actors, directors, filmmakers and more. Among these gems is late director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich on John Wayne in Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), followed by thoughts on the same film from critic David Thomson.
Of the many things John Wayne left for fans to admire—a compelling and enduring legacy on-screen and off—is a who’s who of Hollywood content that hails from an analog age and is hitting big in the digital era. Looks like it’s time to join the club.
