Soaring music, towering mesas, and wild Western wonders abound in John Ford's 1939 rouser, Stagecoach. Starring Claire Trevor as the shady lady with a heart of gold despised by the local wives, and introducing in his first A-list film starring role one Marion Morrison, aka John Wayne, as Ringo Kid.
Ringo has just escaped from prison, and is on his way to Lordsburg seeking revenge on the man who killed his brother. Luckily for Ringo, the stagecoach also headed for Lordsburg happens by when Ringo's horse gives out. Unluckily for Ringo, the marshal is there riding shotgun.
Shot in beautiful black and white, Stagecoach rolls along saturating the screen with indelible images from Ford's legendary cinematic eye. His rare facility with the medium accounts for the film being so well done. It's in the way he uses light and shadow, the way he fills his frame. Always interesting, never complicated.
That also describes the story. Just a handful of passengers in a coach proving all the world's a stage. It's a story about a few people going from one place to another, yet with that simple premise, a legendary picture. Think Grand Hotel on wheels, as rustic as that one is fancy.
Corny, too. "Give me coffee," says the drunk doctor (excellently played by Thomas Mitchell) when duty calls for him to sober up, "black coffee. Lots of it." As if that would do any good, to tack the jitters on top of being drunk.
And the whole movie is like that. Old-time cornball about as real with the West as Buck Rogers is with space. Keeping this in mind, we know with John Ford we won't be seeing anything approaching an accurate depiction of Native Americans. One scene has a bank manager whining about how the Apaches "strike like rattlesnakes," and the next moment a whiskey peddler calls for Christian charity among the passengers, but not for the Apaches.
That's the big disappointment. A moral dilemma, even. To watch an old John Ford Western is to bathe in a tainted tub, yet to consign him to perdition is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The best filmmakers cite his influence repeatedly. Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg.
There's a solution: A film about Native Americans arriving on European shores in ever-increasing numbers. With all of the pertinent details inverted to make a serious point while entertaining in old school black and white. A movie made by Native Americans, starring Native Americans, with Native Americans playing Europeans, and Europeans having zero say, while providing the major conflict, and doing things poorly, and dropping like flies while the good guys kill them in corny ways. Huge potential here.
Andy Devine co-stars as the amiable stagecoach driver with the cracked voice. Andy's the barometer. If Andy likes a feller, then that feller's a-ok. And if he don't, then the feller ain't. Co-starring also John Carradine as a superfluous riverboat gambler.
Of the two women aboard, one is supposedly respectable. The bank manager, also, is supposedly respectable. Today we rarely see, if ever, such a character taken to task. "What's good for the banks is good for the country!" the bank manager nervously assures. Looking suspicious.
Ah, the classic Western desert: Where the skulls of cows liven up the view like well-placed knickknacks in a drawing-room. A huge component of Ford's success is, of course, the Arizona-Utah region known as Monument Valley. The natural scenery itself steals the show. That great big Western feeling that comes from wide open spaces, the blank page of possibility rolling ever on.
Carrying the capacity to win over viewers not necessarily fans of Westerns, Stagecoach exemplifies the Hollywood Golden Age classic which, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, helped shape perceptions of America within the county, and beyond, and still does.
Available through Netflix and elsewhere online.
STAGECOACH
Starring Claire Trevor,
John Wayne,
Andy Devine,
Thomas Mitchell,
John Carradine,
Louise Platt,
Donald Meek,
Burton Churchill,
Tim Holt
Directed by John Ford
Written by Dudley Nichols
Based on a story by Ernest Haycox
Runtime 96 minutes
Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE
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