“It's hard to know what to say about a film foundational to an entire genre, one that so crystallizes the genre's conventions that everything that came before seems to be a leadup, everything after an imitation or a revision. So maybe it's a better idea to look at 1939's Stagecoach through the career of its director, John Ford.
“Prior to 1939, Ford had become an established Hollywood hitmaker and won an Academy Award for directing 1935's The Informer. But for all that, his career seemed to lack consistency, ranging from prestige dramas to screwball comedies to big-budget spectacles and miscellaneous studio assignments. In 1937 he bought the rights to the short story ‘The Stage to Lordsburg’ and spent the next two years convincing producers to make it despite the general belief that the Western was a third-rate genre and skepticism of Ford's insistence on casting the little-known b-movie star John Wayne. But Ford stubbornly got the picture made, and it was the first of his films that truly could have been made by no other director, marking his ascent into the pantheon of American filmmaking.
“What Ford brought to the slim story was, to use an overused term, visionary. ‘The Stage to Lordsburg’ provided him with a bare narrative framework into which he could develop his own personal themes and obsessions, which here included broad comedy, left-leaning social critique, carefully modulated cinematography, kick-ass action sequences, and the notion of the Western as the definitive distillation of America, all assembled in a sleek, non-stop 96-minute package. Earlier Westerns of the '10s and '20s were made in the shadow of Buffalo Bill shows and events that were still on the fringes of living memory; by 1939 it was possibly to reconfigure the genre via Ford's use of archetypal characters and Monument Valley landscapes to take the genre out of the realm of the stale ‘oater’ and into something fresh and vital, bordering on fanstasical and mythic.
“This might make the film seem grander and more daunting than it is, but it's Ford's genius to keep his pretensions on a short leash and make a movie that also moves, that hardly has an ounce of fat on it. In today's world, every studio comedy and action movie is an undisciplined 130+-minute bloatfest. It's a pleasure to see a film of thought, feeling, and grace that is also a piece of entertainment of the highest craft.” ~ Jeff McMahon
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