IF YOU'RE looking for the birthplace of the modern Western, look no further than Stagecoach.
Released in 1939, it was a game-changer that elevated the traditional Wild West movie, which had been circling the cinematic wagons since the silent era, from Saturday morning kiddie fayre to something much more adult and worthy of critical attention. It also laid the road map for director John Ford’s future career and, as such, the career of every auteur who approached the genre since, from Sergio Leone to Sam Peckinpah and even Clint Eastwood.
It wasn’t Ford’s first Western of course - his silent era efforts lie mostly lost - but it’s certainly his most important. Aside from being his first to feature sound, it’s also the film where he first ventured into the vast, unforgettable vistas of Monument Valley. That awesome Arizona- Utah setting is somewhere the great film maker would revisit many times, of course, and somewhere he filmed so effectively it remains, for many, the perfect visual encapsulation of the Old West. For millions of movie lovers the world over, Monument Valley is quite simply the home on the plain for the pioneering big screen cowboy.
Perhaps most significantly, though, Stagecoach made a star of John Wayne, linking the towering actor to the Western genre forever. The Duke is Henry, referred to throughout by most as 'Ringo' or 'The Ringo Kid', a fresh-faced and youthful figure who makes up just one fascinating character in a film loaded with them.
Based on Ernest Haycox’s 1937 short story The Stage To Lordsburg, this is the tale of a bunch of disparate travellers who take a stagecoach journey through dangerous Apache territory. Among them are the booze-addled Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), a shamed prostitute called Dallas (Claire Trevor), the pregnant Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt) and a whiskey salesman by the name of Samuel Peacock ( Donald Meek).
When the stage coach driver Buck (Andy Devine) asks Marshall Curley Wilcox (George Bancroft) where his armed guard is for the journey, he’s informed he’s off looking for the impetuous Ringo, who has escaped from prison after his father and brother are murdered. The story goes, the Kid is heading to Lordsburg looking for revenge: fearing the worst, Curley decides to board the coach himself to provide a little armed protection.
This is a morally complex film peopled with some serious characters, including the great John Carradine as Hatfield, a Confederate soldier turned gambler, that grips you from the start and winds up some impressive tension as the storylines start to interweave.
It’s amazing how Ford makes a small scale and personal film into something much bigger through those awe-inspiring locations and the way he allows those differing characters to shine and grow throughout.
From here on in the humble Western would be granted more respect, and the tales of frontier bravery and the ups and downs of human nature at its best and worst that have followed in its wake all owe it a considerable debt.
Thoughtful, exciting and lush like only a John Ford film can be, Stagecoach still delivers the goods all these long years later.
