JOHN FORD’S STAGECOACH

Stagecoach has been billed as a new style of Western, but a truer statement would be that it attains a purity and depth of symbolic expression rarely shown in earlier films. There had been good bad men, drunken doctors quoting literature, and prostitutes with hearts of gold in Westerns like William S. Hart’s Hell’s Hinges from the early teens. The problem was that the early attempts at artistic expression and character development had been very limited and they were quickly replaced by a flurry of repetitive low class formula films.

Ford had been working with screenwriter Dudley Nichols for a number of years and they developed a very spare and delicate script designed around an outstanding group of actors. Indeed, the worst problem they had was convincing producers that John Wayne deserved a lead role among so many quality performers. The narrative moves quickly from heavy action to tension and character development and back again to another action crisis. There never is a wasted scene where the audience is not carried along by the plot or the reactions of the main players.

Ford stands out as the epitome of a controlling artistic influence or auteur. He maintained his own stock company of performers and crewmembers. He had studied many of the best European films and had a very clear idea of artistic elements he wanted to use. His dominance included using any psychological mind games he could to obtain the right kind of performance from his actors and to guarantee that they would not interfere with his judgment. He even had one crewmember play appropriate music on an accordion to establish the moods he wanted. 

The glory of this film is that it contains a remarkable convergence of new elements that were never used unselfconsciously again. Harry Goulding, who had run a shop among the Navahos for many years, had recently begun taking photos from Monument Valley to film offices in Los Angeles in hopes of snaring Hollywood money for his beloved valley. John Ford fell in love with the lonely majestic landmarks and they saw the first of many appearances in this film. John Wayne had languished in a B Western hell for nearly a decade, but over that time had studiously remade his gait and improved his delivery, absorbed everything he could about film work, and was ready for a quality director. Ford himself, as Tag Gallagher put it, seemed to be seeking “a new heroic sensation and premythic purity.”

The character he establishes for Wayne, the military wife, the sense of freedom from civilization mixed with an unshakable sense of duty, his definitions of American values, and the playful camaraderie between men were in their artistic infancy. At his best in later films such as The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, the technical mastery was there, but so was a stable of Ford clichés. Like any doting parent, no matter how much experience he gained, there never was a time when he again approached the fresh and intense creative focus he exhibited in this film.