StagecoachAPPROACHES TO FILM Main Page / Course Syllabus / Discussion Forum / Film Pages / Exams & Grades
StagecoachUS (1939): Western
Not rated, Black & White, 96 minutes
The classic western, Stagecoach is John Ford's greatest epic of the frontier. This western eclipsed all films in the genre that had gone before it and so vastly influenced those that followed that its stamp can be found in most superior westerns made since Ford stepped into Monument Valley for the first time. With the exception of his abortive leap into leading man status in The Big Trail (1930), Wayne had been languishing on the tiny backlots of Poverty Row studios, riding through a host of forgettable B westerns until summoned by Ford to fame, fortune, and stardom in this film.
Stagecoach, set in a landscape of endless horizons, is a wonderful broad portrait of pioneer life in the untamed Great Southwest, as well as an in-depth character study of eight people, all diverse in their pursuits and all traveling to separate fates on a journey packed with danger.
Click here for the introductory slideshow
Scenes for analysis (Require RealPlayer, available as a free download from www.real.com):
The passengers. High peril is present from the first scenes, which depict Geronimo (Chief White Horse) on the warpath and the telegraph wires cut by raiding Apaches. Leaving the town of Tonto, New Mexico, are a bunch of social misfits accompanied by a few decent souls. Dr. Josiah Boone (Thomas Mitchell), who would win a supporting actor Oscar for this role, is a conniving, drunken doctor, long ago kicked out of the medical profession for malpractice. But he still carries with him his doctor's bag and is ready for any emergency, or so he says while cadging drinks at the local saloon.
Leaving also on the stage is Dallas (Claire Trevor), a
fallen lady whose sexual exploits have so unnerved the local women that they have banded
together to oust her from their scandal-mongering society. Hatfield (John Carradine), a
shady gambler with the manners of a southern gentleman, has his own mysterious reasons for
leaving Tonto, but pretends that the real reason is to offer Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt),
who is pregnant and married to a cavalry officer, his "protection" as she
travels to be with her husband.
Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill), a pompous and demanding banker with a shrewish wife (Brenda Fowler), gets aboard the stagecoach carrying a small valise, which is locked and which he will not let go of, while Mr. Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek) carries a sample case that contains no mysterious contents, at least to Boone. Meek is a whiskey salesman, and Boone considers him the finest traveling companion a drunk could ever have.
These six strangers make up the passenger list, and riding on top on the driver's seat is driver Buck Rickabaugh (Andy Rickbaugh)—a garrulous type with an aversion to Indians—and tough, gruff, but fair-minded Sheriff Curly Wilcox (George Wilcox), a lawman riding "shotgun," on the alert for a cowboy who has just broken out of the state penitentiary.
Escaped con. The stage moves off, heading for distant Lordsburg, but it travels only a few miles when, turning a bend, the travelers hear a rifle shot. The camera shows, in a marvelous tracking shot, the Ringo Kid (Wayne), larger than life, stoically facing the stagecoach rushing at him. The camera assumes the position of the stagecoach coming to a halt before the cowboy. The tracking shot moves in fast on Ringo, losing focus for a moment, to stop in a closeup of Ringo looking up at U.S. Marshal Wilcox, who holds a shotgun leveled at him.
Ringo says that his horse came up lame and he needs to get to Lordsburg. He surrenders his rifle to Wilcox, who tells him he is under arrest as an escaped convict. Lt. Blanchard (Tim Holt), the officer in charge of the cavalry escort, rides up to see that all is well, and Wilcox assures him that it is. Ringo gets into the coach, and it departs.
As Ringo sits on the floor, Gatewood looks down on him with a sneer, saying, "So, you're the notorious Ringo Kid." Boone recognizes him as the brother of a man he treated for a broken arm. When he inquires about the brother, Ringo informs him that he was murdered.
Traveling Monument Valley. The stage rolls on through the great tracts of Monument Valley, huge, towering buttes jutting along the path of the scurrying coach. The coach comes to a way station, and the passengers alight to have a meal. The proper Mallory refuses to sit next to prostitute Dallas; only Ringo sits with her to eat, noticing that no one is sitting next to him. Mallory asks Hatfield if he's ever been in Virginia, and he tells her that he served in her father's regiment (in the Confederate Army during the Civil War). Ringo tells Dallas at the other end of the table that he wishes he had met her earlier and that he used to be a good cowhand; he also tells her he won't go back to prison until he does a job in Lordsburg.
The passengers are called to the stagecoach for the continuing journey and all climb aboard. Some miles across the open desert the cavalry escort under Holt's command leaves the coach, going on its patrol in a different direction. Now the stage and its passengers are unprotected, racing along through the wild territory.
Wilcox and Rickbaugh talk while driving the horses forward, discussing how Luke Plummer (Tom Tyler) and his two brothers (Joe Rickson and Vester Pegg) have killed Ringo's father and brother and are waiting in Lordsburg to kill Ringo. Wilcox looks about him and, noticing snow on the ground, asks why Rickbaugh is taking the mountain road. The driver tells him it's to avoid Indians.
Inside the stagecoach, tensions rise as the passengers, except for Ringo, continue to show their contempt for Dallas. Meanwhile, Gatewood complains about the cavalry escort leaving them, and Boone continues to vex liquor salesman Meek by drinking one sample after another from his liquor case.
The coach races onward, coming through a gap in the mountains to another rest station. Chris (Chris-Pin Martin), the proprietor of the station, tells Wilcox and the others that the Apaches raided the station the night before and then tells Mallory that her husband, a captain of the cavalry troop who had been stationed there, was wounded and taken to Lordsburg. Mallory collapses, and Wilcox carries her to a back room. Mallory goes into labor, and Boone, drunk from sampling Meek's wares, reluctantly goes to her aid. Outside, the Mexican hands flee with all the spare horses.
Doctor delivers baby. Later, as a coyote is shown howling in the
distance, Ringo and the others sit about impatiently. Finally there is the sound of a
new-born baby crying. Dallas, beaming, steps out of the back room holding the child and
showing it to the men. Dallas tells them it's a little girl and that Mallory is going to
be all right. Boone steps out of the back room, triumphant, to be congratulated by
everyone. When Dallas goes outside to get some air, Ringo follows her. He haltingly asks
her to join him at his ranch across the border, an invitation that stuns her so much she
can only decline. 
Wilcox appears, as if to tell Ringo he
will never be far from him.
The next morning, Chris runs frantically about, shouting that his wife (Elvira Rios), an Apache woman, has run away. Wilcox instinctively reaches for his pistol when awakened and jerks upward into a sitting position so that he yanks the shackles he wears on his leg, the other end of which is locked around Ringo's foot. He unlocks the shackles as the passengers prepare to leave.
When Gatewood sees Rickbaugh helping him with his black case, he shouts for Rickbaugh to keep his hands off. Boone refuses a drink, now feeling proud to be a physician, and looks in on Mallory to find that Dallas has been sitting with her all night. Later Dallas tells Ringo that if he leaves the station, heads for his ranch, and stays away from Lordsburg, she'll join him later. He makes a break for it, and Wilcox goes after him, finding him staring at the distant hills and telling him that the smoke rising from the hills are Indian war signals.
Indian attack. The passengers hastily prepare to leave the station, carrying Mallory and her baby on board the stagecoach. The stage races out into the open country and arrives at the ferry only to find that it has been burned out by raiding Apaches. Everyone gets out so that logs can be tied to the sides of the coach to make it float while the horses pull it across. After the coach is pulled across the river, the passengers get in, and the stage races forward on the last leg of the trip to Lordsburg.
As it passes a ridge overlooking the barely visible roadway, the camera pulls back to reveal a horde of Indians on horseback, holding rifles and staring down at the stage. Inside the stage the passengers begin to talk about the journey as if it is over, and right in mid-sentence Meek is suddenly struck in the chest with an arrow.
The Indians then attack ferociously, Wilcox returning the fire as Rickbaugh whips the horses to a furious pace. The stage rolls down out of the foothills and onto the salt flats of the desert, the Indians rapidly gaining ground. Wilcox hands out weapons to the passengers reaching for guns from the open windows, and Ringo climbs on top of the stage to get his rifle from Wilcox and fire at the Apaches now almost riding alongside the stage. One brave races ahead of the others and tries to grab the reins of the lead horse. Ringo shoots him, and he falls in front of the stage, its horses and carriage rolling over him. (This stunt was performed by the great Hollywood stuntman Yakima Canutt; it was to be his personal trademark over the years.)
Firing carefully at the Indians who are now abreast of the coach are Boone and a wild-eyed Hatfield. Rickbaugh is suddenly hit in the arm so that he loses his grasp of one rein, and the stage begins to slow down. Ringo leaps from the coach to the first pair of horses, then the next, and then the leading horses, finally mounting one of them and spurring the team onward.
In the coach Dallas holds the baby close, looking down at the child, then buries her head in its blanket-wrapped body, believing the end is near. Hatfield looks into the cylinder of his pistol to see only one bullet left. He turns to Mallory who is praying with a look of desperation on her face. She does not see Hatfield's hand reach forward and point the gun at her head, an act of mercy intended to prevent her from falling into the hands of the savages. But, before he can pull the trigger, Hatfield is himself shot.
Faintly, there is the sound of a distant bugle, and soon charging troopers arrive on the scene, driving the Indians off. As the coach is brought to a halt, Ringo jumps off the lead horse, runs to the carriage, and throws the door open. He hears Hatfield, held by Boone, tell Mallory with his dying words: "If you see Judge Greenfield...tell him his son..." The fallen aristocrat of the Old South slumps forward, dead.
The cavalry escorts the battered stagecoach into Lordsburg. It is night, and the baby and Mallory are taken off the coach. Mallory haltingly gives Dallas her thanks.
Shoot-out in Lordsburg. Some friends of the Plummer boys see that Ringo is on the stage and run to tell Plummer, who is playing cards in a saloon. When the dealer sees his hand of cards, he prophetically announces: "Aces and eights—dead man's hand, Luke." (This was the poker hand that Wild Bill Hickok was holding on August 2, 1876, when he was shot in the back and killed by Black Jack McCall in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.)
Plummer, the worst of the Plummer gang and killer of Ringo's father and brother, stands up with a grim look on his face and cashes in his chips. Plummer goes to the bar, belts down a shot of liquor, and looks around warily as other drinkers leave the bar quickly, knowing a shooting is about to occur. A sheriff shows up, not to arrest Ringo, but to put the cuffs on an indignant Gatewood, the banker who has looted his own vaults and has been carrying the money in his little black bag.
In gratitude for his life-saving action against the Apaches, Wilcox allows Ringo ten minutes to face the Plummer gang. Ringo takes some bullets out of his hat while Wilcox hands him his rifle. Ringo finds Dallas outside of a brothel and asks her if that is where she lives. She tries to say her last goodbyes, but Ringo, who has known her scarlet past all along, insists, "We ain't never gonna say goodbye."
In the saloon Plummer and his brothers drink heavily. Boone walks into the bar calmly, stands at the end of the bar, and tells Plummer, who is about to step outside with a shotgun, "I'll take that shotgun, Luke." Plummer gives him a lunatic grin and replies, "You'll take it in the belly if you don't get out of my way!" Nervelessly, Boone stares back at the dark-eyed gunman and says, "I'll have you indicted for murder if you step outside with that shotgun." Plummer pauses for a moment, then tosses the shotgun onto the bar, shoves Boone out of the way, and steps to the street with his two brothers.
Outside, Plummer stops beneath a balcony, and one of his saloon girls throws down a rifle to him. The Plummers step into the street and move forward cautiously, turning and looking in all directions at shadows. They are seen by the camera at a long distance down the street, and, close up, Ringo steps into the scene and begins to walk toward them. The camera cuts back and forth quickly showing Ringo and the Plummers advancing toward one another, and then only Ringo, shown from low level, walking resolutely forward until he is almost on top of the camera before flopping to the ground, firing three rounds rapidly as he falls.
Dallas, outside the bordello, hears many
shots and runs forward a little, then begins to weep. Luke is shown walking back into the
saloon, past a crowd of silent, staring men, and then, just as he is about to take a
drink, he falls down dead on the floor. Dallas hears boot heels on the wooden sidewalk
coming toward her. She turns and looks anxiously into the dark, out of which steps Ringo.
They embrace as Wilcox brings up a buckboard and asks Ringo if he's ready. Ringo gets into the buckboard and tells Dallas that Wilcox will take her to his place as the lawman has promised the outlaw. Says Wilcox, getting off the buckboard, "Maybe you'd like to ride a ways with the Kid." She nods and gets in. Suddenly Wilcox and Boone begin throwing pebbles at the horses and shouting, driving the horses down the street wildly. Ringo and Dallas are surprised but delighted at this reprieve and chance to start life anew.
When they are gone, Boone says to Wilcox, "Well, they're saved from the blessings of civilization." Wilcox offers to buy the liquor-loving Boone a drink, and Boone holds up a finger and says, jokingly, "Just one!" The lawman and the doctor go arm-in-arm grinning down the street toward the saloon, and the camera cuts to the buckboard going slowly across the great expanse of the desert as the sun begins to rise with the credits at the finish.
Ford had not directed a western in thirteen years before making Stagecoach, his last film in the genre being Three Bad Men (1926). This film came as a shock to the movie community in that Ford was no longer thought of as a western director; now he had, out of the blue, so to speak, produced the greatest western ever seen. He would later state that "Stagecoach blazed the trail for the "adult" western, but this discounted too many great silent films of the genre, including his own and those of William S. Hart, who made many "adult" westerns, such as Hell's Hinges (1916) and Tumbleweeds (1925).
Stagecoach was the first western to portray in-depth characters with allegorical themes running just beneath the surface plot of their life and death struggles. Moreover, Ford employs a dazzling array of technical skills in presenting this film, as well as framing each breathtaking scene as if it were a painting. The landscape of the awesome Monument Valley serves both as a backdrop and a constant reminder of the freedom of the frontier and the dangers inherent in enjoying that freedom.
There is a constant sense of history running throughout the film, as Ford's characters endure every hazard, undergo every indignity, survive most of the hazards of the land they inhabit. There are many elements at work in Stagecoach, the finest being Ford's conception of good triumphing over evil, with help along the way from basically weak but well-intentioned people, who, in the end, prove much stronger than they themselves envisioned.
After reading a story by Haycox in Collier's Magazine in 1937, entitled, "The Stage to Lordsburg," Ford contacted the author and bought the film rights for $4,000. (He would later say that he thought Haycox had gotten his idea for his story from Guy de Maupassant's "Boule de Suif," a tale about an esteemed citizen and a prostitute traveling by coach through France during a war.)
Ford was not above using good scenes done by others. The closeup of Carradine's hand holding the gun to Mallory's head to show a mercy killing was almost a duplicate of a scene shot by D.W. Griffith in The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1914), when Lillian Gish is almost exterminated before falling into the hands of brutal savages. Ford's long-time scriptwriter, Nichols, deserves much of the credit for the literate and often humorous dialog, as well as the penetrating characters he created, many of these parts, though original at the time, going on to become stereotypes in the endless imitating of the film.
Casting. The first person Ford thought of as the outlaw in Stagecoach
was an overgrown prop boy he had met ten years earlier and had promoted into B westerns,
Wayne. He called his favorite actor to his yacht in 1937 and asked him to read the script.
Wayne read the script, and then Ford asked him who Wayne thought should play the outlaw.
Wayne shocked the director by telling him that Lloyd Nolan would be a good bet. Ford shook
his head and said, "Damn you, Duke, can't you do it?"
When Wayne did decide to perform in the film, Ford had a hard time trying to sell Wayne and the story, as a major film, to any of the Hollywood studios. He finally convinced independent producer Walter Wanger to put up $250,000 (one-tenth of the budget for The Big Trail, Wayne's only other major film up to that time). Wanger at first wanted Gary Cooper to play the outlaw, but Ford talked him out of it and promised the producer that he would give Trevor top billing since she had a more established name at the time.
Shooting on location. After finally getting the go-ahead from Wanger, Ford took his entire cast and crew, numbering eighty-five people, into primitive Monument Valley (location sites also included Utah-Colorado towns, Kernville, Victorville, Fremont Pass, Dry Lake, Calabasas, and Chatsworth, California). No film had ever been made in the remote Monument Valley, and its arid plains, 4,000 feet above sea level, and jutting buttes, some reaching 1,500 feet, startled audiences when it was first seen. During the 1880s, stagecoaches had actually crossed this enormous valley, and Ford made excellent use of the old coach trails, which are seen running through the broad expanses like old scars.
Canutt performs most of the incredible stunts in the film, although Ford allowed Wayne to do most of his own, including the jumping from horse to horse when the coach is about to go out of control. Canutt roomed with Wayne in a small cabin during the on-location shooting, teaching him stunts. The attack on the stagecoach was made by more than 300 Navajo Indians from the Arizona reservation, who, along with the stagecoach, averaged 46 miles per hour on horseback across the flat plains of Monument Valley.
Some of Ford's shots of the stagecoach, shot on clear days, were
taken as far as forty miles away from the moving coach. The cast and crew labored for ten
weeks in the Utah-Colorado wilds before Ford was satisfied with what he shot. But it was
another three months before he had the film edited and scored.
Wanger later made claims that Stagecoach was all his idea and even that he discovered Wayne in the B films. Ford angrily issued statements to the contrary, and Wanger backed away from his claims. The film, which would glean as much as $1 million after its initial release, established Wayne as a major talent and thrust Ford, as its premiere director, into the western-making limelight, where he remained to his death.
Stagecoach was successfully reissued many times, mostly billed with Long Voyage Home (1940), but its original negative prints over the years were either destroyed or lost. Wayne finally came to the rescue, as he did in so many celluloid tales, providing his own copy of the film to be reproduced and preserved in 1970.
Acknowledgements: Tracy Helixon contributed the discussion questions and introductory slideshow for this page.