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.

Meek, introverted accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) journeys West from Cleveland to the mysterious town of Machine where he’s been promised a job, only to find that the job is taken and that the company owner, John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), is a gun-toting sociopath who listens to nobody.

Film fans will see a striking resemblance between this classic and the storyline for A History of Violence. Just when you thought you were out – they pull you back in. Isn’t that how it always works out?

The complexities of Charles Laughton’s classic about a psychotic preacher and the nature of childhood make it a must-see.