This is the first in a series of articles in which we take a look at some of the directors John Wayne worked with on more than a number of occasions, starting with Andrew V. McLaglen.<\/p>\n
Son of actor Victor, Andrew was a British born director who went on to work with some of the biggest Hollywood stars of all time, including Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, James Stewart and of course John Wayne, with whom the director made five movies.<\/p>\n
His relationship with JW started in the early 1950s when he worked as assistant director on \u201cBig Jim McLain\u201d, \u201cThe Quiet Man\u201d and \u201cBlood Alley\u201d, to name but a few.<\/p>\n
At one time touted as a worthy successor to John Ford, McLaglen cut his directing teeth on numerous TV Western shows as \u201dGunsmoke\u201d, \u201cRawhide\u201d, \u201cHave Gun Will Travel\u201d and \u201cWagon Train\u201d.<\/p>\n
A third of the nigh-on forty films he went on to direct were Westerns, although McLaglen also had a huge box-office hit in Europe with a contemporary war film, \u201cThe Wild Geese\u201d, which concerned the adventures of a group of mercenaries set in Africa.<\/p>\n
Probably McLaglen\u2019s best Western, outside of those he made with Wayne, is the American Civil War film, \u201dShenandoah<\/a>\u201d, which starred James Stewart and Doug McClure, and is the closest the director got to emulating the style and approach of Ford himself.<\/p>\n The films that McLaglen and Wayne made together were produced over a ten-year period and consisted of four Westerns and a modern-day action movie. This article will revisit our earlier reviews of those films and at the same time present them in order of preference.<\/p>\n