Trivia: Arguably the most popular -- and certainly the busiest -- movie leading man in Hollywood history, John Wayne entered the film business while working as a laborer on the Fox lot during summer vacations from U.S.C., which he attended on a football scholarship. He met and was befriended by John Ford, a young director who was beginning to make a name for himself in action films, comedies, and dramas. Wayne was cast in small roles in Ford's late-'20s films, occasionally under the name Duke Morrison. It was Ford who recommended Wayne to director Raoul Walsh for the male lead in the 1930 epic Western The Big Trail, and, although it was a failure at the box office, the movie showed Wayne's potential as a leading man. During the next nine years, be busied himself in a multitude of B-Westerns and serials -- most notably Shadow of the Eagle and The Three Mesquiteers series -- in between occasional bit parts in larger features such as Warner Bros.' Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck. But it was in action roles that Wayne excelled, exuding a warm and imposing manliness onscreen to which both men and women could respond. In 1939, Ford cast Wayne as the Ringo Kid in the adventure Stagecoach, a brilliant Western of modest scale but tremendous power (and incalculable importance to the genre), and the actor finally showed what he could do. Wayne nearly stole a picture filled with Oscar-caliber performances, and his career was made. He starred in most of Ford's subsequent major films, whether Westerns (Fort Apache [1948], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949], Rio Grande [1950], The Searchers [1956]); war pictures (They Were Expendable [1945]); or serious dramas (The Quiet Man [1952], in which Wayne also directed some of the action sequences). He also starred in numerous movies for other directors, including several extremely popular World War II thrillers (Flying Tigers [1942], Back to Bataan [1945], Fighting Seabees [1944], Sands of Iwo Jima [1949]); costume action films (Reap the Wild Wind [1942], Wake of the Red Witch [1949]); and Westerns (Red River [1948]). His box-office popularity rose steadily through the 1940s, and by the beginning of the 1950s he'd also begun producing movies through his company Wayne-Fellowes, later Batjac, in association with his sons Michael and Patrick (who also became an actor). Most of these films were extremely successful, and included such titles as Angel and the Badman (1947), Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954), and Hondo (1953). The 1958 Western Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks, proved so popular that it was remade by Hawks and Wayne twice, once as El Dorado and later as Rio Lobo. At the end of the 1950s, Wayne began taking on bigger films, most notably The Alamo (1960), which he produced and directed, as well as starred in. It was well received but had to be cut to sustain any box-office success (the film was restored to full length in 1992). During the early '60s, concerned over the growing liberal slant in American politics, Wayne emerged as a spokesman for conservative causes, especially support for America's role in Vietnam, which put him at odds with a new generation of journalists and film critics. Coupled with his advancing age, and a seeming tendency to overact, he became a target for liberals and leftists. However, his movies remained popular. McLintock!, which, despite well-articulated statements against racism and the mistreatment of Native Americans, and in support of environmentalism, seemed to confirm the left's worst fears, but also earned more than ten million dollars and made the list of top-grossing films of 1963-1964. Virtually all of his subsequent movies, including the pro-Vietnam War drama The Green Berets (1968), were very popular with audiences, but not with critics. Further controversy erupted with the release of The Cowboys, which outraged liberals with its seeming justification of violence as a solution to lawlessness, but it was successful enough to generate a short-lived television series. Amid all of the shouting and agonizing over his politics, Wayne won an Oscar for his role as marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, a part that he later reprised in a sequel. Wayne weathered the Vietnam War, but, by then, time had become his enemy. His action films saw him working alongside increasingly younger co-stars, and the decline in popularity of the Western ended up putting him into awkward contemporary action films like McQ (1974). Following his final film, The Shootist (1976) -- possibly his best Western since The Searchers -- the news that Wayne was stricken ill with cancer (which eventually took his life in 1979) wiped the slate clean, and his support for the Panama Canal Treaty at the end of the 1970s belatedly made him a hero for the left. Wayne finished his life honored by the film community, the U.S. Congress, and the American people as had no actor before or since. He remains among the most popular actors of his generation, as evidenced by the continual rereleases of his films on home video.

Trivia: Winsome Canadian-born leading lady Cecilia Parker made her first film at age 16. She was one of the hardest-working B ingénues of the 1930s, appearing in many a Western, serial, and rural romance. In several of her films, she teamed with wholesome leading man Eric Linden. Much of Cecilia Parker's latter-day fame rests primarily on the 11 appearances she made in MGM's Andy Hardy series (1938-1944) in the role of Andy's older sister, Marian.

Trivia: Virtually the prototype of all grizzled old-codger western sidekicks, George "Gabby" Hayes professed in real life to hate westerns, complaining that they all looked and sounded alike. For his first few decades in show business, he appeared in everything but westerns, including travelling stock companies, vaudeville, and musical comedy. He began appearing in films in 1928, just in time to benefit from the talkie explosion. In contrast to his later unshaven, toothless screen persona, George Hayes (not yet Gabby) frequently showed up in clean-faced, well groomed articulate characterizations, sometimes as the villain. In 1933 he appeared in several of the Lone Star westerns featuring young John Wayne, alternating between heavies and comedy roles. Wayne is among the many cowboy stars who has credited Hayes with giving them valuable acting tips in their formative days. In 1935, Hayes replaced an ailing Al St. John in a supporting role in the first Hopalong Cassidy film, costarring with William Boyd; Hayes' character died halfway through this film, but audience response was so strong that he was later brought back into the Hoppy series as a regular. It was while sidekicking for Roy Rogers at Republic that Hayes, who by now never appeared in pictures with his store-bought teeth, earned the soubriquet "Gabby", peppering the soundtrack with such slurred epithets as "Why, you goldurned whipersnapper" and "Consarn it!" He would occasionally enjoy an A-picture assignment in films like Dark Command (1940) and Tall in the Saddle (1944), but from the moment he became "Gabby", Hayes was more or less consigned exclusively to "B"s. After making his last film appearance in 1952, Hayes turned his attentions to television, where he starred in the popular Saturday-morning Gabby Hayes Show ("Hullo out thar in televisium land!") and for a while was the corporate spokesman for Popsicles. Retiring after a round of personal appearance tours, Hayes settled down on his Nevada ranch, overseeing his many business holdings until his death at age 83.

Trivia: Veteran American character actor Forrest Taylor is reputed to have launched his film career in 1915. His screen roles in both the silent and sound era seldom had any consistency of size; he was apt to show up in a meaty character part one week, a seconds-lasting bit part the next. With his banker's moustache and brusque attitude, Taylor was most often cast as a businessman or a lawyer, sometimes on the shadier side of the law. Throughout his 40 year film career, Taylor was perhaps most active in westerns, appearing in such programmers as Headin' For the Rio Grande and Painted Trail. From 1952 through 1954, Forrest Taylor costarred as Grandpa Fisher on the religious TV series This is the Life.

Trivia: Yakima Canutt was the most innovative stunt performer and coordinator ever to risk life and limb for the art of Hollywood illusion. Cheating death at every turn, many of the tricks of the trade he first developed in the Westerns of the silent era remain fixtures of the craft even today. Born Enos Edward Canutt on November 29, 1895, in Colfax, WA, he began working on ranches while in his youth and at the age of 17 signed on as a trick rider with a Wild West show, where he ultimately won the title of Rodeo World Champion. Billing himself as Eddie Canutt, "the Man From Yakima," in 1917 he met Hollywood cowboy star Tom Mix, who recruited him as a stunt man. Quickly he became one of the leading fall guys in the industry, with a knack for horse spills and wagon wrecks. Over and over again, Canutt brought Western reelers to a rousing finale by doubling as the hero as he leapt from his horse to tackle a villain attempting to flee from the long arm of the law. In 1920, Canutt first earned billing for his work in The Girl Who Dared. Soon his name was appearing in the credits of several Westerns each year, all highlighted by his daredevil antics. His reputation rested on his ability to mastermind larger-than-life sequences -- cattle stampedes, covered-wagon races, and the like -- as well as intricate battles between frontier settlers and their Indian rivals. He could also be counted on to leap from a cliff's top while on horseback, or from a stagecoach onto its runaway horse team. For his elaborately choreographed fight scenes, Canutt developed a new, more realistic method of throwing punches, positioning the action so that the camera filmed over the shoulder of the actor receiving the blow, with the punch itself coming directly toward the lens. With the addition of sound effects, the illusion of fisticuffs was complete, and the practice remains an essential component of the stunt man's craft today. Under Canutt's supervision, a number of rules and guidelines designed to improve stunt safety were established, all of them becoming industry standards. Indeed, to his credit no one was ever seriously injured in any of his films. Many of Canutt's most important innovations involved his use of rigging: In one such attempt to minimize the possibility of broken bones, he carefully rigged his stirrups to break open to allow his feet to release at the proper moment. He also rigged cable mechanisms to trigger stunt action, maintaining more control over his scenes to eliminate the possibility of catastrophe. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers -- nearly every major Western star -- owed much of his success to Canutt's daring; eventually, his mastery of the craft was such that scripts were penned without detailed descriptions of their fight scenes or chases, and "Action by Yakima Canutt" was simply written instead.By the mid-'20s, Canutt was starring in Westerns as well as handling stunts. However, as the sound era dawned he suffered an illness which stripped the resonance from his voice, effectively ending his career as a leading man and reducing him to turns as sidekicks and heavies. In 1932's serial The Shadow of the Eagle, he was cast alongside John Wayne, beginning a partnership that was to endure for many years; their most notable collaboration was the 1939 classic Stagecoach, where Canutt not only came aboard as the stunt supervisor but also appeared onscreen to take falls as a cowboy, an Indian, and even as a woman. In addition to keeping peace between Wayne and director John Ford, Canutt also performed one of the most legendary stunts in film history, a pulse-pounding pass under a moving stagecoach: Doubling as an Indian, he rode his horse ahead of the coach before attempting to leap over to its lead team and dropping to the ground; after a brief moment, he then released his grip and allowed the horses and the coach to pass over his body. As Canutt grew older, injuries began to take their toll, and he cut back on his rigorous schedule, making the transition from stunt performer to coordinator to, ultimately, director. However, he still found time to appear onscreen in noteworthy films like 1939's Gone With the Wind, not only standing in for Clark Gable during his wagon drive through the burning streets of Atlanta but also playing the renegade soldier who attacks Scarlett O'Hara and tumbles backward down a flight of steps. In his later years Canutt also served as a second-unit director, most notably aiding William Wyler on 1959's Ben-Hur, where he helped supervise the choreography of the famed chariot race (a sequence two years in the making). Canutt also oversaw the many animal action scenes in Old Yeller, as well as the car chase in The Flim-Flam Man.In 1966, Canutt received a special Academy Award for his lifetime of excellence as a stunt performer, winning kudos "for creating the profession of stunt man as it exists today and for the development of many safety devices used by stunt men everywhere." In 1975, he was also inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. Canutt remained active in films until 1976, ending his career as a consultant on Equus. His son later carried on in the family business. In 1979, Canutt published his memoirs, Stunt Man: The Autobiography of Yakima Canutt. Yakima Canutt died in Hollywood on May 24, 1986, at the age of 90.

Trivia: Gawky, loose-limbed Al St. John performed from childhood with his family in vaudeville and burlesque around his home state of California, perfecting an athletic bicycle act that would stand him in good stead for the remainder of his career. Despite his parents' misgivings about "the flickers," St. John was persuaded to enter films by the success of his uncle, Mack Sennett star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. St. John became a "Keystone Kop" in that famous congregation's very first film, The Bangville Police (1913), supported Charles Chaplin and Marie Dressler in the feature comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), and then followed Arbuckle to Comique, where he and the young Buster Keaton functioned as "second bananas" to the hefty star. On his own, St. John starred in Educational comedies (one, The Iron Mule [1925], directed by his now disgraced uncle under the pseudonym of William Goodrich), all along developing his patented rube personality complete with oversized overalls and porkpie hat.St. John himself later claimed that a deal with the Fox company went sour and that he suddenly found himself more or less blacklisted by the major studios. He did appear in one of Roscoe Arbuckle's comeback shorts, Buzzin' Around (1933), but by the mid-'30s he seemed all washed up. To keep food (and, it was rumored, quite a bit of spirits) on the table, St. John switched gears and began pursuing a career in independently produced B-Westerns. He played a variety of characters, both major and minor, before almost accidentally stumbling over the particular role that would sustain him for the rest of his career and make him perhaps the favorite sidekick among kids -- that of the limber, baggy-pants braggart Fuzzy Q. Jones.Poverty Row company Spectrum had originally intended for Melody of the Plains (1937) to co-star singer Fred Scott with Fuzzy Knight but he proved unavailable and the script was simply never changed. St. John became so popular in the role that, by 1940, he was playing Fuzzy in no less than three Western series simultaneously, PRC's Billy the Kid and Lone Rider programmers and Republic Pictures' Don "Red" Barry vehicles. He remained with the Billy the Kid/Billy Carson Westerns when star Bob Steele was replaced by Larry "Buster" Crabbe and was still Fuzzy Q. Jones in 1947 when Crabbe left in favor of Humphrey Bogart-lookalike Al "Lash" LaRue. In quite a few of these downright poverty-stricken potboilers, St. John provided the only glimmer of entertainment. As LaRue often remarked, "Fuzzy could stumble over a match stick and spend 15 exciting minutes looking for the match." In other words, kids didn't really go to see a Buster Crabbe or Lash LaRue Western, they went to see Fuzzy.Al St. John was unique among B-Western sidekicks in that he actually carried his films rather than the easily disposable leading men. Both Crabbe and LaRue were well aware of that and remained steadfast in their praise for the diminutive performer. When the LaRue era finally ended with a short-lived television series, Lash of the West (1953), St. John returned to the boards and continued making personal appearances until his death from a heart attack.

Trivia: Though no relation to comedian Chester Conklin, Charles "Heinie" Conklin spent his early film years at Chester's alma mater, Mack Sennett's Keystone studios; in later years, Heinie claimed to be one of the original Keystone Kops. Heinie's silent-screen makeup consisted of heavy eyebrow lining and a thinnish, upside-down, painted-on variation of Kaiser Wilhelm's moustache. In areas where anti-German sentiments still ran high during the post-World War 1 era, Conklin was billed on screen as Charlie Lynn. One of Conklin's first talkie appearances was as the addled military hospital patient in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). He spent most of his sound career in microscopic bit roles, often appearing at Columbia studios in support of such 2-reeler stars as The Three Stooges, Andy Clyde, Hugh Herbert and Harry Langdon. Significantly, Heinie Conklin's last billed performance was in 1955's Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops.

Trivia: American character actor Earl Dwire was most closely associated with the B-Western movie mills of the 1930s. Dwire frequently played the antagonist in the low-budget vehicles of such cowboy stars as Bob Steele and Johnny Mack Brown. In the early '30s, he was virtually a regular in the John Wayne Westerns produced by the Lone Star outfit. He also occasionally accepted such contemporary minor roles as a priest in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) and a gangster in Accidents Will Happen (1939). Earl Dwire's last known film credit was the Universal serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940).

Trivia: White-haired Lafe McKee (real name, Lafayette McKee) was seemingly born old, dignified, and kind. Already playing old codgers by the mid-1910s, McKee delivered one of the funniest and most improbable moments in B-Western history, when, disguised as a bedraggled señorita, he sprang Ken Maynard from prison in Range Law (1931). "The Grand Old Man of Westerns," as film historian William K. Everson called him, retired in the early '40s after more than three decades of yeoman work opposite every cowboy hero on the Hollywood range, from Franklyn Farnum to Gary Cooper.

Trivia: Most of character actress Fern Emmett's early appearances were in westerns, where she played scores of maiden aunts, hillbilly wives, town spinsters, ranch owners and stagecoach passengers. When she moved into contemporary films, she was most often seen as a landlady or gossip. She enjoyed a rare breakaway from this established screen persona when she played a screaming murder victim in the 1943 Universal thriller Captive Wild Women. Seldom given more than a few lines in "A" features, Emmett was better-served in programmers and 2-reel comedies. Emmett so closely resembled "Wicked Witch of the West" Margaret Hamilton that some historians have lumped their credits together, even though Emmett began her film career in 1930, three years before Hamilton ever stepped before a camera. Fern Emmett was the wife of actor Henry Rocquemore.

Trivia: Sometimes he was Hal Price, other times he was Harry Price. Sometimes (in fact, much of the time) he wasn't billed at all. Whatever the case, Hal Price was one of the more ubiquitous performers in the field of B-Westerns and serials. He was the bald, mustachioed frontiersman who usually said something like, "We got a nice, quiet town here, stranger...and we aim to keep it that way."

Trivia: After years on the circus and vaudeville circuits, Si Jenks came to films in 1931. Virtually always cast as a grizzled, toothless old codger, Jenks was a welcome presence in dozens of westerns. In Columbia's Tim McCoy series of the early 1930s, Jenks was often teamed with another specialist in old-coot roles, Walter Brennan (17 years younger than Jenks). In non-westerns, Si Jenks played town drunks, hillbillies and Oldest Living Citizens usually with names like Homer and Zeke until his retirement at the age of 76.

Trivia: A veteran of Selig two-reelers in the early 1910s, burly American character actor Horace B. Carpenter came to the forefront after joining the Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount) in 1914. For pioneering director Cecil B. DeMille, Carpenter played Spanish Ed in The Virginian (1914) and Jacques D'Arc in Joan the Woman (1916), both still extant, before striking out on his own, directing and acting in some of the cheapest Westerns and action melodramas ever produced. Returning to acting exclusively after the changeover to sound, Carpenter continued to play his stock-in-trade, kindly fathers and ranchers in scores of B-Westerns. Thus, it came as an unpleasant surprise when the veteran actor, out of sheer poverty one imagines, accepted to play Dr. Meinschultz, devouring a cat's eye in the 1934 exploitation thriller Maniac. Carpenter survived this indiscretion with his career somewhat intact and continued to play scores of supporting roles and bit parts right up to his death of a heart attack.

Trivia: Actor Tex Palmer was busy in films from 1932 to 1947. Spending his entire career in B-Westerns, Palmer played bits and minor roles in the films of such sagebrush favorites as John Wayne and Ray "Crash" Corrigan. From 1937 to 1939, he showed up in six of singing cowboy Tex Ritter's vehicles for Grand National Pictures. Tex Palmer was particularly active at PRC Studios in the 1940s, appearing in the company's Billy the Kid, Lone Rider, Frontier Marshal, Buster Crabbe, and Eddie Dean series.