‘Well, there are some things a man just can’t run away from...’
I’ve recently warmed to westerns after years of indifference and master director John Ford is part of the reason for that. I loved his The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance and that made me want discover more of his work. The thread that links that movie to Stagecoach is not just Ford behind the camera but also John Wayne in front of it. The difference being that there is 23 years and a lot of cinema innovation between the two films…
An eclectic group featuring Ringo Kid (Wayne), Doc Josiah Boone (Thomas Mitchell) and Hatfield (John Carradine) attempt a dangerous journey across hazardous terrain with a group of violent Indians on their trail.
Not just a western then, but a proper cowboy vs Indians movie. An area of cinema that I have previously left unexplored. Ford does a great job with the limited resources at his disposal. The sets and costumes are astonishingly good, as is the obligatory incredibly dangerous stunt work, but the film does suffer from being shot in black and white. The world created in films set in the Wild West is so colourful that the monochrome world of Stagecoach feels robbed of a certain something.
As for Wayne, the Ringo Kid, he plays the same character he always plays. Wry smile. Masculine. A leader. And he does it very well. It is worth noting that this was the film that made Wayne a star, however. Meanwhile, many of the more common western tropes are on offer elsewhere. A guy playing piano in the corner of a dive bar. Men pouring themselves a shot of whisky before downing it in one. It may seem hackneyed and trite now, but at the advent of the second world war, there must have been a certain comfort in being able to escape into a world so removed from our own.
Stagecoach is not a patch on The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, and it’s not on the same level as the work of Sergio Leone, but it is one of the finest examples of the pre-war western. Worth a look.