63. Stagecoach(1939) directed by John Ford Next: #62. Tootsie
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Well, you can guess. I've been down on Westerns enough in this space for you to probably guess what my prevailing mood was going into this.
The PremiseNine people are somewhat randomly thrown together on a (wait for it) stagecoach ride through the Southwest. Each one of them dislikes at least one of the others, but after they endure some serious trauma and fear, most of them learn a bit about themselves and the others.
Notes and Stuff- There was something about this movie that felt a bit off to me from the beginning, and it took an amateur review on IMDB to put my finger on it. This isn't really a pioneering Western. This is a pioneering disaster film. Strangers, each with a murky backstory, put in a confined space, and thrown obstacle after obstacle...this movie has less in common with Shane and The Searchers than with Airport and The Poseidon Adventure. Except, thank God, O.J. Simpson was not prominently involved.
- I'm really glad I don't live on the West Coast. Every time I see any reference to Wells Fargo, anywhere, the evil part of my brain screams "The Wellthz Fargo wagon ithz-a-coooooommmmmin' down the street!" as loud as evil parts of one's brain can possibly scream. And they're everywhere on the West Coast.
- John Wayne's character's name is Ringo?!? My God, that's worse than Ethan.
- The drunken doctor, though a cliche straight out of Central Casting, is played to perfection by Thomas Mitchell. His run-ins (or is it runs-in?) with his landlady and the local branch of the Prunefaced Women's Temperance Society (they are worse than Apaches) are great moments.
- Somewhere around the time this movie came out, it seems like moviemaking underwent a major shift from a sort of "Wow! We're making moving pictures!" mentality to a style of telling deep stories with rich characters. Although Stagecoach does have some "Wow!" elements - the sweeping panorama of Monument Valley with the tiny stagecoach running through it are visually striking - it also has a deeper plot than I expected from most 1930s-era Westerns, and a much deeper plot than I expect from any current summer blockbusters.
- It's great that basically everyone in the stage gets a shot at a monologue. I take the T pretty regularly, and if someone's giving a monologue there, you can bet that they have a couple empty seats on either side of them.
- This isn't really a spoiler, since it doesn't affect the plot too much...but I had no idea that Mrs. Mallory was pregnant until they came out with the baby. I figured she fainted because the heat and the weight of her own self-righteousness got to be too much for her. This wasn't like most pregnancies, where you can tell the new mom, "Congratulations! We all knew you had it in you"; this floored me. I can assume it's going to be a shock to her husband when she finally finds him, too.
- This may be tremendously politically incorrect of me, but I'm really glad Ford didn't burden us with telling any part of the story from the Apaches' point of view. I know how awful America was to its original inhabitants, but this isn't the time or the place to tell their story. Leave that to Costner. This is, like I said, a disaster movie. When the Titanic went down, nobody cared about the iceberg's motivation.
Best Line
Ringo: Well, I guess you can't break out of prison and into society in the same week.
SummaryI was surprised how much I enjoyed this. Of course, I enjoyed The Poseidon Adventure, so make what you will of that. For my money, you can't go too far wrong putting a bunch of people on the edge into a tricky situation. True, some of the passengers are cardboard-cutout-quality cliches (say that 5 times fast), but John Ford keeps things moving and sets us up for a satisfying finale. I liked it.
CastJohn Wayne as the drummer for Liverpudlians The Beatles, Claire Trevor as the former scarlet woman trying to turn her life around, John Carradine as the Southern gentleman, Andy Devine as the chubby, squeaky guy, and Thomas Mitchell as the drunk doc.
