Stagecoach

Others may have come first, but John Ford’s Stagecoach put Westerns—and John Wayne, in his breakout role as the Ringo Kid, a famous outlaw who’d just broken out of jail—on the map. Nominated for seven Oscars, and winning two, this story of a group of strangers riding through Apache territory in a stagecoach is the first of many Westerns that Ford shot in Monument Valley, and a model for the genre.