The best Gary Cooper’s action movies

Two young men, one rich, one middle class, both in love with the same woman, become US Air Corps fighter pilots and, eventually, heroic flying aces during World War I. Devoted best friends, their mutual love of the girl eventually threatens their bond. Meanwhile, a hometown girl who's the lovestruck lifelong next door neighbor of one of them, pines away. Cinema's first ever gay kiss?

After the American Civil War, mercenaries travel to Mexico to fight in their revolution for money. The former soldier and gentleman Benjamin Trane meets the gunman and killer Joe Erin and his men, and together they are hired by the Emperor Maximillian and the Marquis Henri de Labordere to escort the Countess Marie Duvarre to the harbor of Vera Cruz.

Drifter Cole Harden is accused of stealing a horse and faces hanging by self-appointed Judge Roy Bean, but Harden manages to talk his way out of it by claiming to be a friend of stage star Lillie Langtry, with whom the judge is obsessed, even though he has never met her. Tensions rise when Harden comes to the defense of a group of struggling homesteaders who Judge Bean is trying to drive away.

Heading east to Fort Worth to hire a schoolteacher for his frontier town home, Link Jones is stranded with singer Billie Ellis and gambler Sam Beasley when their train is held up. For shelter, Jones leads them to his nearby former home, where he was brought up an outlaw. Finding the gang still living in the shack, Jones pretends to be ready to return to a life crime.

Clint Belmet (Gary Cooper) is a bit of a firebrand and is sentenced to at least 30 days in jail, but his partners, Bill Jackson (Ernest Torrence) and Jim Bridger (Tully Marshall) talk a sympathetic Frenchwoman named Felice (Lili Damita) into telling the bumbling, drunken marshal that Clint had married her the previous night. Clint is released so he can accompany Felice on the wagon train heading west to California.

After destroying a Seminole fort, American soldiers and their rescued companions must face the dangerous Everglades and hostile Indians in order to reach safety

An easy-going cowboy is mistaken by the townsfolk for a notorious gunman. The cowboy decides it would be best to leave town, until he meets the gunman's girlfriend.

A disgraced merchant marine officer elects to stay aboard his sinking cargo ship in order to prove the vessel was deliberately scuttled and, as a result, vindicate his good name.

Land, a family, a future. They're "dreams, fried up, short order" for Blayde Hollister (Gary Cooper). Rightly or wrongly, this ex-Confederate from Georgia has waged his own war to settle past injustices. Now he's a wanted man. And he can feel the law closing in on him. Posing as a Boston dandy, he comes to the boom town with a gun and a plan: to smoke out the notorious Marlow brothers (including Steve Cochran and Raymond Massey), then give 'em a whiff of gunsmoke. Director Stuart Heisler (Along Came Jones) keeps the pace flowing like the local saloon's liquor. Max Steiner's score gallops like a hell-for-leather posse and screenwriter John Twist fires scene after scene with lines like "you'll get your pockets picked in a graveyard". Dallas, here we come!

Digby Geste joins his brother, Beau, in the Foreign Legion following the theft of a priceless family heirloom.

Wildcatter Jeff Dawson does his best to bring in a gusher in Mexico despite continual bandit raids. He asks for help from his ex-employer Ward Conway, but Conway, now married to Dawson's ex-lover Marina refuses, fearing that his wife will want to renew her romance with the other man.

This third film version of Rex Beach's rugged Yukon novel The Spoilers was also the first talkie adaptation. This time, Gary Cooper and William "Stage" Boyd are cast as gold prospector Glennister and crooked Alaska politician McNamara.

In the wake of the Spanish-American war, military doctor Bill Canavan (Cooper) arrives at a war-torn Filipino outpost. Infested with cholera and under attack from a vicious local Moro chieftain, the troops are terrified and their commanding officer has all but given up hope. Outnumbered and out of supplies, Canavan decides to trade his scalpel for a rifle and rally the few remaining troops into one last stand before the outpost and everyone inside becomes just another footnote in history.

As the Japanese sweep through the East Indies during World War II, Dr. Wassell is determined to escape from Java with some crewmen of the cruiser Marblehead. Based on a true story of how Dr. Wassell saved a dozen or so wounded sailors who were left behind when able bodied men were evacuated to Australia.