Saturday Night Cinema: Stagecoach

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema feature for our fourth of July holiday weekend is considered the best Western in film history: the great American western classic, Stagecoach, directed by the great American film director, John Ford. Starring John Wayne in a career -making performance , Claire Trevor, John Carradine …… a magnificent ensemble piece.

Stagecoach has been hailed as a classic production by the American Film Institute and the National Film Preservation Board among others. However, it is more than just John Wayne's subtle performance and John Ford's outstanding direction that make this a must-see for cinema enthusiasts. Dudley Nichols's screenplay for Stagecoach produces an ensemble of characters that keep the audience interested throughout its ninety minute length. The film's personalities have both flaws and strengths that make them survive or die before the motion picture's end. The direction, acting, writing and scenery of Stagecoach have also been major influences for the film industry since its release in 1939 while also saving the western genre from extinction. From the opening credits over Monument Valley through to the surprising final line Stagecoach is a fantastic piece of work. (more here)

STAGECOACH New York Times review 

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By Frank S. Nugent

Published: March 3, 1939

In one superbly expansive gesture, which we (and the Music Hall) can call Stagecoach, John Ford has swept aside ten years of artifice and talkie compromise and has made a motion picture that sings a song of camera. It moves, and how beautifully it moves, across the plains of Arizona, skirting the sky-reaching mesas of Monument Valley, beneath the piled-up cloud banks which every photographer dreams about, and through all the old-fashioned, but never really outdated, periods of prairie travel in the scalp-raising seventies, when Geronimo's Apaches were on the warpath. Here, in a sentence, is a movie of the grand old school, a genuine rib-thumper, and a beautiful sight to see.

Mr. Ford is not one of your subtle directors, suspending sequences on the wink of an eye or the precisely calculated gleam of a candle in a mirror. He prefers the broadest canvas, the brightest colors, the widest brush, and the boldest possible strokes. He hews to the straight narrative line with the well-reasoned confidence of a man who has seen that narrative succeed before. He takes no shadings from his characters: either they play it straight or they don't play at all. He likes his language simple and he doesn't want too much of it. When his Redskins bite the dust, he expects to hear the thud and see the dirt spurt up. Above all, he likes to have things happen out in the open, where his camera can keep them in view.

He has had his way in Stagecoach with Walter Wanger's benison, the writing assistance of Dudley Nichols, and the complete cooperation of a cast which had the sense to appreciate the protection of being stereotyped. You should know, almost without being told, the station in life (and in frontier melodrama) of the eight passengers on the Overland stage from Tonto to Lordsburg.