Your weekly fix of great movies made before you were born that you should check out before you die. John Wayne wasn’t the first choice to play Captain Tom Wilder. Or the second. Or third. But he takes the role of a man trying to lead a village through treacherous waters without a map, and he makes it his crazy own. It’s a middle child of his career and a middle child of the genre (whatever genre that might be), but it manages to be an enduring classic simply because of how strange it is.

In keeping with our exploration into 007 this week, Jorge Sosa digs into the dark dirt of The Big Sleep a noir that might have inspired some of the Bond myth.