Donovan's Reef

John Wayne's last film with mentor and long-time collaborator John Ford (The Searchers) is a 1963 comedy about a group of war veterans settled on a South Pacific island. When the daughter of one of them (Jack Warden) comes for a visit, the freewheeling status quo between the boys is disrupted. This is Ford in his chummy, amiable, roughhousing mode--think of Victor McLaglen's drunken fight scene in Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon--and it is entirely pleasurable. Wayne is comfortable in his man's-man role, and Lee Marvin (who played Wayne's nemesis in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) is effectively roguish. --Tom Keogh