John Ford's Stagecoach
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We're the victims of a foul disease called social prejudice…. These ladies of the Law and Order League are scouring out the dregs of the town…. Come, be a proud, glorified dreg like me.
No grave social problem could exist while the wilderness at the edge of civilizations [sic] opened wide its portals to all who were oppressed, to all who with strong arms and stout heart desired to hew out a home and a career for themselves. Here was an opportunity for social development continually to begin over again, wherever society gave signs of breaking into classes.
A commonplace observation states that Hollywood films of the studio era repressed class consciousness and were loath to acknowledge, much less seriously address, this fundamental category of social difference. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that at certain historical moments and in specific generic formulations and authorial assertions, Hollywood classical texts, as conservative as they generally may have been, did not maintain a steady state of oblivion to the inequality imposed by economic and social differences or to the class implications of gender. As I will argue in this essay, the intertwined inscription of class and gender in John Ford's Stagecoach presents us with a particularly revealing exception to this “rule” of inscribing class in classical Hollywood.
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