NFR Project: 'Stagecoach' (1939)

 

NFR Project: ‘Stagecoach’

Dir: John Ford

Scr: Dudley Nichols

Pho: Bert Glennon

Ed: Otho Lovering, Dorothy Spencer

Premiere: March 3, 1939

96 min.

How do you describe perfection?

There are very few “perfect” films out there, ones to which you would not remove or add a frame. Seven Samurai, Grand Illusion, Children of Paradise. Director John Ford has made more immaculately conceived and executed films than anyone I know. The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, The Searchers, Wagonmaster, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, his cavalry trilogy. Stagecoach is one of these.

At the time this film was made, Westerns were an unreputable genre, strictly kid stuff. No one had attempted to make an “A” list Western since the notorious flop The Big Trail in 1930.

John Ford had started out his directing career in the silent era, making Westerns, and he had a taste for the mythic possibilities of frontier storytelling. (The closest he had come previously to making a Western epic was the excellent The Iron Horse, in 1924.) Now he focused all his genius on telling a solid story about the Old West.

In the movie, the stagecoach is set to go from Tonto (which means “stupid” in Spanish) to Lordsburg. The Apaches are on the warpath, and the coach’s passengers are warned of the dangers. However, some of them are in no position to stay. Dallas (Claire Trevor), a prostitute, is being forced out of town by the shrewish ladies of Tonto. They also have no use for the alcoholic Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), whom they consider a reprobate.

They are joined by a proper Eastern lady (Louise Platt) who is off to see her military husband, and who is very pregnant to boot. A Southern gambler, the gentlemanly Hatfield (John Carradine), gallantly adds himself to the roster in order to look after the lady. To the coach comes also Peacock (Donald Meek), a mild-mannered whiskey drummer, and the crooked banker Gatewood (Berton Churchill), who’s absconding with the bank’s funds.

Driving the coach is the scratchy-voiced comic relief character Buck (Andy Devine), who is accompanied by the marshal Curley (George Bancroft), who is on the lookout for the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who busted out of jail and is looking for the three Plummer brothers, who killed his father and brother. The don’t get very far when they encounter Ringo, who is walking due to his horse coming up lame. Provisionally under arrest, he joins the others, squeezing into the coach.

Together they wheel across the desert, interacting with each other. The polite members of their society disdain Dallas, but Ringo falls for her and treats her with respect. The lady is forced to give birth at a way station, and Doc Boone gets sober in order to facilitate the delivery – redeeming himself somewhat. Ringo almost escapes, but stays when he sees Apache smoke signals.

Finally, the Indians attack. In along sequence, the stagecoach races frantically along a salt pan, with tribesmen in pursuit. Just as all seems lost, the cavalry arrives to save them and bring them into Lordsburg.

There, Ringo asks for the chance to face down the Plummers, and Curley lets him go. In a nighttime shootout, he kills them all and prepares to return to jail. However, Curley and Doc give him and Dallas a buckboard and set them free, off to his ranch south of the border to start a new life.

The script by Dudley Nichols is exceptional, creating a ensemble of complex, three-dimensional characters who change and grow during the course of the film. (The lady befriends Dallas; the banker is apprehended; Peacock and Buck are wounded, and Hatfield is killed.) Ford wisely lingers his camera on the faces of the participants, letting their reactions further the story. Ford shot his location work in the iconic Monument Valley, that magnificent hunk of desert on the border of Utah and Arizona. It was a landscape he would return to again and again.

The juxtaposition of the epic scope of the setting and journey with the small intimate moments the characters dwell in give the film an intense resonance. With cinematographer Bert Glennon, Ford crafts stunningly beautiful screen compositions, minute after minute. And of course, this was the movie that made John Wayne a star. (He was the lead in The Big Trail; its lack of success doomed him to a deace of work in “B” Westerns.)

The group is a microcosm of society, and a subversive one at that. The “legitimate” characters are crooked, snobbish, ineffectual. It is the outcasts and rejects who are the real noblemen and -women here. Those who lead with words do nothing to solve the group’s problems; it is those who take action that count for something. In the end, they are the only ones who emerge unscatched.

Stagecoach also includes iconic stuntwork, courtesy of the stuntman legend Yakima Canutt. The film never lags or loses its way. We are given just enough information in any given moment to advance the story or illuminate character in depth, making this a genre film that transcends genre, one that can truly be called the first adult Western.

The Old West proved fertile ground for Ford to examine the convolutions and contradictions of the American character, turning myths inside out and holding them up for our examination. Stagecoach rewards repeated viewings – notably, Orson Welles screened it multiple times prior to his making Citizen Kane. What is ostensibly a simple story becomes a moving, stirring, thought-provoking, classic motion picture.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Tevye.