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10 results

John Ford's Stagecoach
  • Edited by Barry Keith Grant
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    05 December 2002
  • Stagecoach is one of the classics of Hollywood cinema. Made in 1939, it revitalized the Western genre, served as a milestone in John Ford's career, and made John Wayne a star. This volume offers a rich overview of the film in essays by six leading film critics. Approaching Stagecoach from a variety of critical perspectives, they place the film within the contexts of authorship, genre, American history and culture. Also examined are the film's commentary on race, class, gender and democracy, while remaining attentive to the film's artistry.

  • Introduction: Spokes in the Wheels

    • By Barry Keith Grant, Professor of communication, popular culture, and film, Brock University in Ontario, Canada
  • Edited by Barry Keith Grant, Brock University, Ontario
  • Book:
    John Ford's <I>Stagecoach</I>
    Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    05 December 2002, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    THE GOLDEN COACH

    A famous passage in Walker Percy's novel The Movie-goer testifies to the mythic power of John Ford's Stagecoach. As Binx Bolling, Percy's eponymous narrator, confesses:

    The fact is, I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives – the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lovely girl in Central Park, and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I, too, once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in The Third Man.

    But in fact Ford does not show us John Wayne as the Ringo Kid killing the three Plummer brothers. After Ringo drops to the dusty street as he fires his three bullets, the film cuts to Dallas (Claire Trevor), showing us her reaction to the gunfire that carries over on the soundtrack, her fear that one of those bullets may have injured or killed Ringo. Bolling remembers – or, more accurately, misremembers by embellishing – the second of Stagecoach's two thrilling climaxes as if he actually saw it. As Ed Buscombe notes about this scene, it is “believable only because we don't actually see it.

  • Reviews of Stagecoach

  • Edited by Barry Keith Grant, Brock University, Ontario
  • Book:
    John Ford's <I>Stagecoach</I>
    Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    05 December 2002, pp 179-184

  • Summary

    STAGECOACH

    Welford Beaton

    Reprinted from The Hollywood Spectator (February 18, 1939).

    One of the greatest of all Westerns. And one of the most interesting Hollywood possibly could have for study. It is superb entertainment, but take it apart and we discover all the story it has could be told comfortably between the two ends of one reel of film. That interests me because one of the beliefs the Spectator has expressed at intervals during the past decade is that the story is not the thing of most importance to screen entertainment, that what really matters is the manner of telling what story there is – that it is the medium that entertains. Film producers as a whole know too little about their medium to give them confidence to test a theory. Walter Wanger apparently is an exception. Stagecoach is evidence of his willingness to put to a test the theory that the medium, not the story, is the thing. He takes us with a stagecoach on a trip across a stretch of Western territory at a time when prowling Indians made it perilous. After one brush with the Redskins, the coach gets through; at the destination one of the passengers kills the three desperadoes who had killed his father and brother. There youhave all the story there is. And for one hour and thirty-three minutes it is gripping entertainment. It is a Grand Hotel on wheels.