This was one of the first John Wayne movies I bought, originally on VHS, now on DVD. It's one of my favorite movies period. Please don't use the term soldiers when you mean sailors. It just seems disrespectful somehow, especially in this context. I like Donna Reed more here than in ."From Here to Eternity". She seems more real here. Her relationship with Wayne's character also seems more real than her relationship with Montgomery Clift.

Virgil Earp was severely wounded long after the famous gunfight at the O.K. corral. Also, while the movie is highly fictionalized, the gunfight is very accurate. Even some of the dialogue during the gunfight was accurate. There was a book called "Helldorado" written by a witness to the gunfight that tells the story and shows how events actually happened and that is the only truly accurate part of the movie. It is still a great Western. Most truly great Westerns are fiction.

While "Last of the Mohicans" is one of my favorites on the list, I don't consider a movie that takes place entirely in New York state, even mostly eastern New York state to be a true western. Also, I never liked "Dances With Wolves". It's opening scene of Costner riding between the lines of a Civil War battlefield with his arms spread in a Christ-like pose would not have earned him a choice of postings, it would have earned him an immediate ticket to an insane asylum. That ruined the entire movie for me.