John Wayne and in them he played cowboys, cavalrymen, and unconquerable loners extracted from the Republic's central creation myth." Wayne's other roles in Westerns include a cattleman driving his herd north on the Chisholm Trail in "Red River" (1948), a Civil War veteran whose young niece is abducted by a tribe of Comanches in "The Searchers" (1956), a troubled rancher competing with a lawyer (James Stewart) for a woman's hand in marriage in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962), and a cantankerous one-eyed marshal in "True Grit" (1969). He is also remembered for his roles in "The Quiet Man" (1952), "Rio
John Wayne turned down.. Batjac, the production company cofounded by Wayne, was named after the fictional shipping company Batjak in "Wake of the Red Witch" (1948), a film based on the novel by Garland Roark. (A spelling error by Wayne's secretary was allowed to stand, accounting for the variation.) Batjac (and its predecessor, Wayne-Fellows Productions) was the arm through which Wayne produced many films for himself and other stars. Its best-known non-Wayne productions were "Seven Men From Now" (1956), which started the classic collaboration between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, and "Gun the Man Down" (1956) with contract player James