Cheyenne / The Boy From Oklahoma

For the first half of the 20th century, Warner Brothers did not have a signature cowboy star. John Wayne toiled in its early talkies, but the 1930s through the war years were a dry period, and putting Cagney and Bogart out West only underlined the problem. Errol Flynn, the studio’s one star who rode tall in the saddle, was indifferent, referring to himself as the “rich man’s Roy Rogers” and seeing his Westerns simply as box office placeholders. Thanks to the Warner Archive Collection