Stagecoach (1939)
Director: John Ford
Had I seen this before: Maybe a long time ago but I'm not certain
The description of this film on HBO Max is as follows: "A group of disparate passengers battle personal demons and each other" good yes please give that to me "while racing through Indian country." Ah. Right. Impossible to talk about this 83-year-old movie without dealing with its 83-year-old view of Native Americans, which is about what you would expect: a nameless, faceless horde of savages that serve as a threat more in the vein of a natural disaster or a rampaging monster than another group of humans with their own personalities and conflicts and motivations. It's a tough element of an otherwise effective and entertaining movie. I personally would have had a better time if I could have substituted every mention of "Geronimo" with "Sharknado" or something, but we live in this imperfect world with these imperfect things and we all just do the best we can.
Aside from bracing myself for whatever elements of the film may be especially of their time, I am not a movie-watcher who approaches older movies with any particular skepticism. I have seen too many wildly entertaining black and white pictures to assume that they can't deliver on that front. I am still, however, occasionally surprised when I am reminded of just how good people had gotten at making movies by the 1930s. The first talking picture came out a mere twelve years before this thing, but it plays like any fun, compelling disaster movie of the modern era.
The personalities and their aforementioned demons are introduced efficiently as they clamber on to the titular stagecoach: Dallas (Claire Trevor) is a sex worker being run out of town by the imperious ladies of the Law and Order League; Doc Boone (top-tier character actor Thomas Mitchell, mostly familiar to me as Uncle Billy from It's a Wonderful Life) is a dedicated drunk who is similarly in the process of being ejected from town (although he is significantly less glum about it); Mrs. Mallory (Louise Platt), a delicate-seeming woman on her way to meet her cavalry captain husband, is being fretted over by her friends about some unnamed condition (hint: later she will faint, someone will be asked to fetch a lot of hot water, and the number of stagecoach passengers will increase slightly); Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek) is a diminutive whiskey salesman whose wares are mercilessly sampled by Doc Boone and who just wants to get back to his wife and five children in Kansas City; Hatfield (John Carradine) is a gentleman gambler and Lost Causer who is unctuously attentive to Mrs. Mallory; Ellsworth Gatewood (Berton Churchill) is a banker with a bag full of embezzled money who jumps on at the last minute in an effort to skip town. There is also Andy Devine as the coach driver (who caused me to spend the entire movie thinking what is that voice where do I know him from only to discover that he is Friar Tuck from the Disney animated Robin Hood) and George Bancroft as the Marshal looking to prevent an impending shootout in the destination city.
As you can imagine, there is already a fine, fizzy group dynamic happening by the time we encounter John Wayne as the Ringo Kid, in one of 20th century cinema's true movie-star-birthing shots. The whole John Wayne, Masculine Cowboy thing isn't really to my taste for the most part, but this young, slightly vulnerable version is undeniably compelling here. (There is also an amusingly clown-car vibe to all 6'4" of him sizing up the very full stagecoach and being like "hey I'm just gonna squeeze in here with y'all.") This movie's take on class is actually one of the more interesting things about it, as the two highest-status men (the banker and the southern gentleman) are both given the get a load of this fuckin' guy treatment, including a moment that underlines how dark and scary a "chivalrous" man's idea of protecting a lady can be, while the disreputable characters are proven heroic by the end. Some classic, satisfying underdog stuff.
This is, above all, an adventure story. When the, uh, Sharknado inevitably strikes, the stunt work is genuinely incredible and reminds you of how much effort and skill Golden Age filmmaking entailed. The acting and directing in those scenes is also sort of fascinating, as none of the passengers are depicted as hysterical, but rather as grimly, silently terrified, which I found struck a more realistic and moving note than over-the-top theatricality would have. And all the while, Monument Valley towers majestically in the background, making a case for itself as the true star of the film.
Line I repeated quietly to myself: "I ain't gonna put a lady in danger without she votes for it."
Is it under two hours: Yes, an efficient 96 minutes
In conclusion: This film seems to have either invented or popularized about two dozen movie tropes, which may, if you watch it with your 12-year-old who is less familiar with the genre, cause her to think that you are slightly psychic when you predict what every set-up is leading to. A fun game!
Authentic Indian Fry Bread from The Stay at Home Chef
There is one scene in this movie in which the characters share a meal, but it is more notable for the social dynamics at play than the food itself, which as far as I could make out involved...beans. And some kind of bread? Probably white people bread, but having just been to Arizona the thing I recently ate my weight (and everyone else in my family's weight) in was frybread. And somehow I still wanted more? (Frybread being, somewhat like this film, extremely delicious but extremely complicated.) Just trying to keep everything equally fraught, here.
Up next: The west gets a little more wiki- wiki- wild
