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The western is arguably America’s greatest contribution to world cinema, and this is the film that elevated the genre to the lofty status it now enjoys. Cowboy stories had been appearing in America since the 1880s in cheap dime novels and Buffalo Bill theatre productions, but what John Ford achieved with Stagecoach was to give the western an added grandeur and depth. The film is the first of the adult or psychological westerns, taking clichéd characters and making them three dimensional. Each character is introduced with a vignette and can be seen to represent a separate social caste.
John Ford, real name Sean O’Fearna, was born on a big farm in Maine. His father was a farmer and his family emigrated from Galway. Ford says he worked for a while in Arizona as a cowboy before he became a filmmaker. That experience, the landscape and the people he met, were part of the inspiration for Stagecoach. Ford’s first feature film was a western, Straight Shooting (1917), starring Harry Carey, whose performance in that film inspired John Wayne in his portrayal of The Ringo Kid.
Stagecoach is as much about the visuals and the landscape (Monument Valley) as it is about the story and characters. What defines the genre is 1. Frontier location, between cowboy and Indian, "civilisation" and "savagery" (the frontier was settled in 1890 after the Battle of Wounded Knee), 2. Time period (almost all westerns are set between 1865 and 1890) and 3. A transgressive act for which retribution must be sought.
Dudley Nichols, who wrote the script for Bringing Up Baby, wrote the excellent screenplay for this film too (inspired by the wonderful Maupassant short story, Boule de Suif). Stagecoach would make a star of John Wayne, right from his first dolly shot close-up early in the film. Both he and Claire Trevor as Dallas are the stars, giving lots of reaction shots to the camera to show their primary status, with Ford often filming how they respond in silence to the events and people around them.
Ford had an eye for composition and the film is full of extraordinary shots, such as the lovely angle from above for the dramatic moment when the horses and stagecoach cross the river. Ford was backed by an incredible team of cinematographers and the camera angles are very elaborate and experimental, always looking for reactions in faces before causes. Also of note are the film's incredible death defying stunts, performed by Yakima Canutt without any special effects. Seeing him leap from horse to horse while they run at high speeds, and then fall to the ground below them and the stagecoach as they pass above, is jaw-dropping.
The structure of the film is perfect, culminating in the scene where The Ringo Kid faces off against Luke, Ike and Hank Plummer in Lordsburg. There’s a gusto to the film too, especially in the character of Buck played by Andy Devine, who is superbly funny and wonderfully naive as Ringo's sidekick - "It’s a baby!" The film also reflects social outrage during the Depression era at the corruption of bankers.
Ford's message seems to be that those at the margins of society, those that are ill thought of and underestimated by society, like the wonderful prostitute character and the drunk doctor, are often the most virtuous. So many now common film tropes, from the man whose surname everyone forgets to the hooker with a heart of gold, can be found here first. Stagecoach is a morality play of sorts (what is and what isn’t a crime? Who has virtue and who doesn’t?) and the film would influence so many directors, notably Kurosawa, who found inspiration in The Ringo Kid for his own lone samurai characters.
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