John Wayne once said his favorite film was She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and he did not stop there. Speaking in 1967 on the set of The War Wagon, he said he thought he did a pretty good job in the 1949 cavalry drama and called it his “best achievement in pictures.”
He was talking about a role that fit the scale of his own legend and, in one respect, set it against it. Wayne was 41 when She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was cast, yet Nathan Brittles was written as a veteran soldier in his 60s, a man nearing retirement and ordered into one last mission to calm tensions between the Cheyenne and Arapaho while escorting the wife and niece of his commanding officer across the country.
The film itself gave Wayne something that matched his own sense of the work. It was a post-Civil War drama, one of his collaborations with John Ford, and by Wayne’s own account it remained the performance he valued most. He said he was “disappointed at not even being nominated for Yellow Ribbon,” a sting sharpened by the fact that the Academy gave the film only one nomination, for Best Cinematography, which Winton C Hoch won.
That gap matters because Wayne’s favorite was not just another entry in a long Western run. John Ford reportedly had not wanted to cast him in the first place and changed his mind only after seeing Wayne in Red River in 1948, later saying, “I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act!” By the time She Wore a Yellow Ribbon reached theaters, it had arrived between landmark Wayne releases, with Sands of Iwo Jima coming two months later and earning him a Best Actor nomination that the Yellow Ribbon performance never got.
What Wayne left behind is a clear answer to a question that still follows his career. Of the more than 170 credits he accumulated, the film he singled out as his favorite was the one the awards season overlooked most completely. The Academy did not make room for the performance Wayne prized above the rest, and that is why the movie now stands less as an awards also-ran than as the work he himself believed was his best on screen.
