Neuigkeiten

Though he made his share of clunkers throughout his career, John Wayne starred in some of his worst films early on. A big part of that was simply down to the way movies were made in the late 1920s and early '30s. Every fan of the Duke knows about his so-called "Poverty Row" era, where he fronted Western movies made for cheap and churned out at a dizzying rate. But when sound in film started to emerge in the late 1920s, Wayne also found himself leading some unique and curious movies that were all based on pictures that had come out less than a decade prior.

For example, Wayne was cast in an early Western remake for the unusual reason that he resembled the star of the original movie. Indeed, Ken Maynard had fronted multiple features for First National Pictures during the '20s, including 1926's "The Unknown Cavalier.

In our nostalgia-mad monoculture, remakes and reboots are everywhere. But Hollywood has always been in the game of regurgitating existing media, even back in the early 20th century when a young John Wayne was slumming it in B-movie territory. The Duke didn't become a screen icon overnight: He had to pay his dues for a good 10 years, making dozens of what were known as "poverty wow" Westerns — low-budget, low-production-value oaters produced by small studios such as Republic Pictures and Monogram Pictures. Throughout the 1930s, these were the films that gave Wayne his start in Hollywood, before director John Ford rescued him from relative obscurity by casting him in his seminal 1939 Western "Stagecoach" (much to the young actor's surprise).

Prior to breaking through with "Stagecoach," Wayne starred in some of his worst films, including 1933's "The Telegraph Trail," with its unenlightened depiction of Native Americans, and 1934's "'Neath the Arizona Skies,...