One star rises and one falls

I just got the John Ford/John Wayne DVD boxed set that came out this month and Stagecoach was the 2ed film that I watched. What a great movie.

As I like to do after I watch a movie like this I come to the IMDb and read the User Comments and follow the links of the players to read their bio's. I was struck by the fact that the actor who plays Luke Plummer, the man that John Wayne kills at the end of the movie, was Tom Tyler.

Tom Tyler was a lead actor in many b-westerns before John Wayne got his first lead. They both stared in many more b-westerns over the next few years. Tom Tyler played in 92 movies and John Wayne 80 movies before Stagecoach. In Stagecoach John Wayne got the lead in the movie that made him a star and Tom Tyler took small part just so he could get in an A-picture. With the exception of a staring roll in a few serials, most notably The Adventures of Captain Marvel, his career as a lead actor, in b-movies, was over and he died broke and crippled by arthritis in 1954 when John Wayne was just reaching his peak years as a movie star. Sad.