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Although I was born at a time when Westerns were a central fixture of American pop culture, I never paid them much attention until much later in life when I chanced upon a repeat playing of director John Ford’s epic 1939 film Stagecoach on late-night TV.
I’d grown up as a member of a generation that told me that actor John Wayne epitomized everything that was wrong and uncool about American culture. But viewing Stagecoach for the first time, I was taken aback to see that John Wayne burned a hole in the screen with his heroic presence from the moment he appeared somewhere out in the devastatingly gorgeous desert landscape of Monument Valley as The Ringo Kid. Wayne’s character was an escaped convict who hitched a ride on a stagecoach with the driver, a lawman, and six passengers as they made their way from the apparently fictional town of Tonto, Arizona to the real town of Lordsburg, New Mexico. Looming over everyone’s heads like poisoned arrows of Damocles during the entire ride was the ever-present threat of being set upon and brutalized by roving packs of Apaches.
Stagecoach is what is known as an “Ark Movie,” where a disparate bunch of characters are packed together in an enclosed space and forced to endure horrific travails en route to their destination. It reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, in which a small group of people, having abandoned a vessel that was sunk by a Nazi U-boat, are surrounded by the deep, wide Atlantic Ocean and the looming threat of sharks should their little inflatable rubber raft sink. In Stagecoach, the passengers are surrounded by the Arizona desert’s flat, dry vastness and the terror of being ambushed by the notorious Geronimo and his war-whooping men.
All of the nine main characters who ride in the stagecoach throughout the movie are white. Unless I blinked and missed it, there isn’t a black to be seen in the entire film, which is refreshing in these days of cinematic blackness-at-gunpoint.
The film’s shooting script by Dudley Nichols and Ben Hecht was based on Ernest Haycox’s 1937 short story “Stage to Lordsburg.” The script mandates scrolling titles at the film’s beginning that directly mention race, but they didn’t make it into the movie itself:
Until the Iron Horse came, the Stagecoach was the only means of travel on the untamed American frontier. Braving all dangers, these Concord coaches — the “streamliners” of their day — spanned on schedule wild, desolate stretches of desert and mountainland [sic] in the Southwest, where in 1875 the savage struggle of the Indians to oust the white invader was drawing to a close. At the time no name struck more terror into the hearts of travellers than that of GERONIMO — leader of those Apaches who preferred death rather than submit to the white man’s will.
Regarding the much-feared Geronimo, would-be protector of the Apaches’ ancestral homeland, his mother, wife, and children were killed by Mexican soldiers in 1851. His Wikipedia profile states that “Throughout Geronimo’s adult life his antipathy toward, suspicion of, and dislike for Mexicans was demonstrably greater than for Americans.”
In his 1905 autobiography, Geronimo wrote:
I have killed many Mexicans; I do not know how many, for frequently I did not count them. Some of them were not worth counting. It has been a long time since then, but still I have no love for the Mexicans. With me they were always treacherous and malicious.
Within the first minute of dialogue, two United States soldiers cite what the script calls an “impassive Indian” standing before them who said that the dreaded Apaches had recently “burned every ranch in sight.” When one of the officers suggests that the Injun might be lying, the other says, “He’s a Cheyenne. They hate Apaches worse than we do.”
Throughout the film, whites and Mexicans seem to get along swimmingly. Both groups view Apaches as a shared enemy. This makes historical sense, because Mexican/Apache conflicts had started back in 1541, almost 250 years before the events in Stagecoach.
Stagecoach driver Buck (the buffoonish but likable character actor Andy Devine) says he has a Mexican girlfriend named Julietta. Chris, the amiable Mexican manager of a way station at Apache Wells, is married to an Apache woman who winds up abandoning him — and taking his beloved horse along with her — while the white stagecoach passengers are resting at his station. This leads to one of the film’s funniest exchanges:
CHRIS: Sure I find another wife. But she take my rifle and my horse! I never sell her, I love her so much. I beat her with the whip and she never get tired!
DOC BOONE: Your wife?
CHRIS: My horse! Find wife easy, yes, but not horse like that!
Roger Ebert, as was his wont before he died and his flabby ass soared up to forever join the Great Red Spirit in the Sky, wrote:
The film’s attitudes toward Native Americans are unenlightened. The Apaches are seen simply as murderous savages; there is no suggestion the white men have invaded their land.
I agree more with C. Jerry Kutner, whose review in Bright Lights Film Journal states:
Even the ostensible villains of the piece, the hostile Indians, are presented with some nuance. Ford treats them as if they were part of the landscape, a force of nature, and when we first see their leader, Geronimo, in close-up, he is presented with great dignity.
It’s perfectly understandable to me that the Apaches would want to terrorize, scalp, and burn down every trace of the white and Mexican interlopers who threatened to take over the land they’d called home for at least 500 years, and possibly twice as long. What’s the big deal?
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
Those who are most concerned with appearances, social status, and propriety turn out to be the film’s least ethical personages, while the most superficially shady or disreputable characters turn out to be the most honorable. I have found this to be a general and almost unerring principle in real life, although I’m sure that those who are most concerned with appearances, social status, and propriety would beg to differ.
The most reprehensible passenger in the stagecoach is Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill), a banker whose shrill and pinched-face wife was a member of the Ladies of the Law and Order League who ran Dallas the prostitute (Claire Trevor) out of Tonto, Arizona. Gatewood never stops snorting contemptuously at Dallas, at Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) the alcoholic physician who was ejected from his boarding house due to missed payments, at Ringo Kid the “jailbird,” at the US government which he feels treats businessmen and bankers unfairly, and of course at all the “savage” Apaches. But at the end of the film, when the stagecoach finally reaches its destination and Gatewood expects the marshals to arrest The Ringo Kid, they instead throw handcuffs on Gatewood for sabotaging the telegraph wire so that he could make away with $50,000 that he’d embezzled from his hometown.
The elegant yet snaky Hatfield (John Carradine), a “Southern gentleman” who clearly had designs on the married Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), turned out to be a trigger-happy serial murderer who shot men in the back and almost used his last bullet to kill Mrs. Mallory before an Apache’s bullet killed him first.
Lucy Mallory, the prim and proper soldier’s wife, showed nothing but disdain for Dallas the hooker until Dallas stayed up all night caring for Lucy’s newborn infant, after which Lucy relented and thanked her.
Marshal Curley Wilcox (George Bancroft), who had been friends with The Ringo Kid’s family but had mainly apprehended him so he could receive the “$500 in gold” by turning him in to the authorities after Ringo’s jailbreak, also relents and helps send Ringo and Dallas to wedded bliss south of the border rather than collect the gold.
Doc Boone, the incurable alcoholic who was booted from town for being late on his rent, shows compassion for Dallas at the film’s outset by reassuring her that “We have been struck down by a foul disease called social prejudice, my child.” He stares down the pompous Hatfield and confronts him about the fact that he literally shoots men in the back. He sobers up long enough to deliver Lucy Mallory’s baby. Right before the final shootout between The Ringo Kid and the three Plummer brothers — if there’s a more gripping final shootout in film history, I’d like to see it – he bravely threatens Luke Plummer with a murder indictment if he brings a shotgun to the fight rather than a rifle. Of the nine stagecoach passengers, only Thomas Mitchell received an Oscar — for Best Supporting Actor in his role as Doc Boone.
In the crucial scene where Ringo confesses his love for Dallas, he reveals that the three Plummer brothers murdered his brother and father. In turn, Dallas tells Ringo that her family was killed by Apaches in a massacre in the Superstition Mountains when she was a kid. So maybe they both had excuses for being ruthlessly tossed upon wayward paths in life — until they found true love with one another.
In a very early scene while the passengers are boarding the stagecoach and the Ladies of the Law and Order League are still gazing disdainfully at Dallas, Buck and Curley inform the passengers that they may face hostile and murderous Apaches en route to their destination. “There are worse things than Apaches,” Dallas says bitterly as she stares out at the prudish harpies who’ve run her out of town.
And in the final scene, while Buck, Curley, and Doc Boone help Ringo evade arrest as they send the lovebirds off to Ringo’s ranch in Mexico for a lifetime of wedded bliss, Doc Boone cracks, “Well, that’s saved them the blessings of civilization.”
There’s a racial and an ethical lesson in this. For Ringo and Dallas, the betrayal of their ethnic kinsmen stung far worse than any Apache’s arrow or any practical discomforts they may suffer by living in a foreign land.
* * *
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84 comments
Very enjoyable, thank you. They knew how to make films back then.
Especially Jewish communists like Ben Hecht. No leftist tendentiousness in his scripts, no sirree! No underminin’ of the civic and moral orders of Traditional America, neither!
We didn’t just go straight from Birth of a Nation to the full-spectrum cinematic abominations of the 21st century. The Left did its own long Overton window-opening to transform a magnificently conservative (as well as white) nation, and Stagecoach was definitely part of that process.
Any specific examples if subversion in Hecht’s films?
On the shooting script I linked to, credit is given to Dudley Nichols and Ben Hecht. The official screenplay credits on the film go to Nichols; Hecht isn’t mentioned at all. All I could find about Hecht’s participation on Stagecoach was that he provided “story ideas.”
I always hated boring Westerns, alongside musicals and courtroom dramas until I realized so many of my favorite actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood were in tons of them, so it became an obligation to appreciate the genre. It represented the last unreconstructed, unapologetic white dominance theme in Western Civilization, and it endured long after the frontier was closed and Manifest Destiny realized. The white man conquering the redskin and the Mexican, taming the wild, settling the West and harnessing its resources in ways the indigenous and all other newcomers never could and never will. It served as an inspiration for many outside of America too, from the likes of Osama bin Laden to Karl May, whose stories were so important to a lowly Austrian painter on the Western Front during WWI that it helped inspire plans for the Eastern Front in WWII. So it can be argued that the folklore of the Western Frontier served to partially unify Europeans worldwide in ways it hadn’t seen since the Crusades, but also to reenforce the notion to nonwhites that European domination is inexorable and beneficial. After all, diversity unceasingly vectors its way to European countries and former European colonial outposts to this day to live as ‘oppressed minorities,’ yet never migrated to the Indian Confederation or any indigenous reservation, while refusing to remain in their own ethno-states because they seek to live even in the shadow of white people, cleaning their toilets, mowing their lawns, babysitting their kids etc just to have access to whites and capture any sort of stardust or glamor-effect that could possibly be transmitted via propinquity.
There is a quote, forgot who said it, that part of America died once there was no frontier. The America we love is a product of the hard times of the wild west that created the strong men who made the good times. We’re now of course in the good times create weak men part if the meme. Nice handle by the way.
“… he almost used his his last bullet to kill Mrs. Mallory before an Apache’s bullet killed him first.”
Curious as it may seem today, but that’s in fact to save her from “a fate worse than death”, i. e. getting raped. It’s a “southern gentleman” act of mercy from a very puritan age. Dramatic situations where the hero is saving his last bullet to kill the heroine to prevent her ordeal, already pointing the gun at her head until the last-minute-rescue arrives, appear in several of Griffith’s silent movies. When I saw this repeated in STAGECOACH I was a bit puzzled because it indicates that the audience understood the “custom” as late as 1939. Ford of course started as an assistant of Griffith and was one of his many great disciples.
I meant of course a “FATE worse than death”, sorry.
I caught the “single bullet” left for the heroine to save her from being raped situation used in a late-fifties vintage episode of CHEYENNE so the “custom” was understood a whole lot later than you think!
It appears in a fair number of later westerns too. Pretty logical wartime behaviour in fact.
It’s referenced in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but with the heroine doing it herself.
That scene was brutal. She thought her protector was dead so she did what he told her to do. All for naught.
I had pondered the “saving her from a fate worse than death” angle, and you’re almost certainly right that this was the director’s intent. But if Hatfield had shot her only five seconds earlier, he would have murdered the mother of a newborn infant since the cavalry showed up and saved the stagecoach’s inhabitants, including Lucy Mallory. I also suspected that he may have also wanted to kill her because Mallory made it clear she was loyal to her hubby. Either way, Hatfield was quite the sneaky snake in the film.
It’s a conscious artistic argument against despair. He uses it in game of thrones too, when cerce was about to poison her son and Tywin bursts through the door at just that moment.
It certainly does make “war time” sense, as another commentator said. The Apache would have probably not just raped, but also tortured and killed her. Audiences of 1939 were aware of this. But there may be indeed have been some other underlying emotional motives with Hatfield.
Griffith used this dramatic device in “Hearts of the World” as well, replacing Injuns with evil Teutonic huns (including Erich von Stroheim who did a lot of raping in WW1 propaganda movies).
I’m not saying it’s a check mate argument, I’m just saying that’s what the scene means or at least others appear to have interpreted that way too.
But yes objectively I agree with you. Robert Howard told of the true story where two Texas Rangers hold off some Apaches for a long time from a wagon with rifles but when they ran out of ammo they killed each other to save themselves for being tortured to death. I think I read here in a review on this site that one time when Apaches captured some white cowboys they strung them between wagons and roasted them alive! Now we give them casinos.
I completely relate to what Jim Goad wrote in the first two paragraphs. I was surprised when I finally watched this film. It is very good! And I was really surprised by John Wayne’s performance. I also liked the humor.
For people who don’t really have an interest in Westerns, I always recommend watching this one, if only this one. Stagecoach is by far the best of the Westerns, I think. And, in my opinion, it is the best of John Wayne’s films (El Dorado a close second).
Great article.
The Searchers is tough to beat.
The Searchers is one of the most disturbing films ever made, I think. Wayne brings a level of intensity to that role that nearly beyond belief. I think he was, in general, a better actor than 99% of his roles and direction allowed him to be. I think the protagonist in Eastwood’s Unforgiven is an homage to Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Wayne did it better.
The scene where he sees the white women that were rescued from the Comanche behaving like wild animals and the look of absolute disgust he gives them is incredible.
I agree, The Searchers is disturbing.
John Ford was a great director, some of my very favorite movies.
You gotta think the Reds were starting to really kick up at the time he worked. He seems pretty agnostic on the HUAC activities
I finally watched The Searchers tonight.
I think Stagecoach was immeasurably better.
I guess I can understand why people might prefer The Searchers because it’s more “based” on race, but as far as filmmaking goes, I think Stagecoach blows it away. The acting, the pacing, the dialogue, the cinematography—everything. At times with The Searchers, I felt like I was watching some corny Sunday night Wonderful World of Disney movie with Dean Jones and Hayley Mills. To me it seemed…average?
I realize I’m in the minority with this, even among film critics who aren’t “based” on race.
I don’t judge things on whether I approve of the message. To me, the craftsmanship matters more when judging the quality of films, literature, music, etc. The message should be judged completely separately from how the message was delivered.
I see a lot of leftists who completely reject what I’d consider masterpieces because they find one “racist” or “sexist” moment in it, while approving of shoddily made garbage just because the “message” is right. I think a lot of ideologues, whether left, right, or upside-down, tend to let their biases get in the way of judging something on its craftsmanship. I was going to say that I “try” not to be that way, but it doesn’t take any effort.
For example, Larry David and I probably don’t agree on anything political, but I still think he’s hilarious.
Then again, judging craftsmanship is entirely subjective, too.
There are lot of things deemed the “Greatest of All Time” where I can’t understand the appeal. At all. One example would be Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. It routinely tops “Greatest Album of All Time” critics’ lists. To me—and I can’t stand The Beach Boys—their earlier hot rod and surfing songs were far better than Pet Sounds.
Or, say, Exile on Main St. by The Rolling Stones. Nearly everyone says it’s their best. It was their 10th British album and 12th American album. I think every album they made before it was miles better. There are maybe three or four songs on that double album that I think are good. But not a single great song. I think they should have hung it up three years earlier, after Brian Jones was found floating face-down in a pool.
Oh, well. As the genius cokehead horse-faced Negro Sly Stone said, “different strokes for different folks.” You can’t argue about subjective matters. It’s futile. But it sure doesn’t stop people from doing it.
Never saw The Searchers or most movies, for that matter, but it deserves credit for spawning THIS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq9FCBatl3A
While watching the film and hearing John Wayne say “that’ll be the day” over and over again, I wondered if it was just a common phrase back then or if it directly inspired the Buddy Holly song. Turns out it directly inspired it.
I also wondered why Natalie Wood, if she’d actually been kidnapped and brutalized by “the Comanch” for years, was wearing bright-red lipstick.
I tend to agree with you. Never understood the fuss about The Searchers.
You don’t like Sticky Fingers either? And what about Her Satanic Majesty’s Request? Do you think it’s better than Exile?
This isn’t to argue subjective tastes, but rather, to clarify whether or not you’re being hyperbolic when you say that everything before Exile was better.
Everything was better with Brian. He was their original leader and the one who named the band. He added a completely different dimension with the sitars and xylophones and flutes. Nothing they did with Mick Taylor matched the depth and magic of songs such as “Paint it, Black,” “The Last Time,” or the entire Between the Buttons album. After he died, the Stones basically became Aerosmith: just another loud blues band.
Their Satanic Majesties Request was their worst album with Brian. But it still had Brian.
I would give Exile maybe 2 stars out of 10, and I’m being generous. It’s a complete mess to my ears. I’m befuddled why anyone would think it’s so great.
I have what is likely an even more unpopular take on Pink Floyd. I think Syd Barrett was a genius. After he was booted, their only song that doesn’t sound like lazy elevator music to me is “One of These Days.”
Mick said in Crossfire Hurricane that an out of it Brian stumbled into the Beggars Banquet sessions, a rare occurrence by that point, and put that beautiful slide guitar on No Expectations. That’s the last thing he played on.
If judgements about craftsmanship in art were entirely subjective, they would be pointless. One might as well shut up and pass not any at all, but that would be boring. Why not simply assume that you can be right and everybody else can be wrong, even in cases of a puzzlingly large consensus (and of course vice versa)?
There are many reasons why people like some movies and music better than others, and it’s not always the greatest craftsmanship which has the biggest audience or critics impact, emotional or otherwise. In some cases judgement is easier than in others, as there are obvious and undeniable differences in quality and complexity. Sometimes comparison will give a good measure. Compared to Stagecoach, The Searchers might not appear as good, but compared to many other westerns of that period… The paradox about judging art is that you need to assume (explicitly or implicitly) objective standards to even say anything at all about it, but there will never be a final conclusion or a final agreement or a final judge to settle the question for once and all, there will always be a constant flow and different perspectives and tastes. I think the reason is that any art experience has an objective as well as a subjective side.
As for The Searchers (I’m in the fan team) I’d say that it is certainly not as tight and perfect as Stagecoach, and in itself rather uneven. The long episode in the middle of the movie about Martin returning back home and fighting for Laurie is rather tiresome. Maybe that was supposed to work as comic/sentimental relief, because the story and main character were pretty grim stuff for mid 1950s audiences. There are some lazy outdoor scenes obviously made in a studio which look really bad compared to the actual gorgeous location shots. Audiences back then were more accepting of such conventions, also of back projections and such which don’t work too well today.
Thanks for fleshing out your issues with post-Jones Stones and for fixing my album title error. It is indeed “Their Satanic Majesties Request,” not “Her Satanic Majesty’s Request.”
I don’t agree with you about the Stones, but I do when it comes to post-Barrett Floyd.
Plenty of good westerns out there.
A great review of a great picture, but a little uncharitable to Hatfield, in imputing his interest in the married soldier’s wife to carnal desires and impropriety. Into the early 20th century it was a common practice for single men to offer their “protection” to unaccompanied women traveling alone. Moreover, it comes out later in the film that Hatfield was a member of her father’s regiment during the Civil War. However unprincipled Hatfield may have been, I believe his motives regarding this woman were actually noble. After all, she was married to a soldier whom she was traveling to meet and she was pregnant. Few men are attracted to pregnant women. A basic premise of this movie is that ignoble people can behave nobly and even courageously in the face of adversity. All things considered, I believe that Hatfield behaved nobly in his concern for Mrs. Mallory.
I saw this film in a film class in college, and this scene was asked about during the post-film Q&A. The teacher actually deferred the question to the projectionist, who stated that Hatfield’s intent was indeed to save the woman from a fate worse than death.
It was confusing scene to many because Hatfield was an unsavory character who was seemingly acting out of character by almost doing a arguably noble deed. He was also an ex-Confederate who by the 1980s was supposed to be on the “wrong” side of the Civil War. But in 1939 this was less obvious to many people.
That same class had earlier shown Buster Keaton in The General, which showed the true story of a Civil War locomotive chase. During that Q&A session someone had asked about showing the Confederates as the good guys. So again these films captured a Zeitgeist as well as a grand story.
I’m surprised that more people here can’t seem to recognize that. It is so obvious that Hatfield has no sexual interest in her, rather she is a window into his past.
However, the stupid driver and the constantly drunk doc get on my nerves and in my opinion The Searchers is a much better film in every way.
The only John Wayne movies I’ve seen are True Grit and The Shootist, both of which I liked (although I will freely admit I liked the TG remake over the original). I think I may have see bits and pieces of Stagecoach, although I was too young to really remember most of it. The Searchers is supposed to be quite red-pilled when it comes to the Comanche. When it comes to western heroes, Eastwood was always more my speed, although I couldn’t make it through 10 minutes of the steaming turd Cry Macho.
The comments here are surprising. I’m surprised anyone liked El Dorado. I, personally, think Fort Apache is John Wayne and John Ford’s best movie by a light year. Stagecoach was OK
Lest we forget, John Ford shoehorned blacks into his later movies and made a total SJW anti racist crapfest called Sergeant Rutledge. I’m pretty sure he also made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a stupid movie in its own right.
Oh to return to the days when things when the left was just about bashing John Wayne and not whiteness en masse. Clint Eastwood is something of a successor to Wayne and he’s been very canny to flex a little with the times but not too much. Eastwood’s western image was forged in Spaghetti Westerns, themselves inspired by Kurosawa samurai films, with Kurosawa a devotee of John Ford. Apparently Quentin Tarantino, director of ‘western’ Django Unchained, hates John Ford. Tarantino is still trying to coast on the legacy of his first 3 films, whereas important Ford films are stretched over 40 years.
Ford’s The Searchers used to regularly appear near the top of lists of great films. John Wayne’s character is a former confederate soldier and famously described as racist towards the Indians, though having had his family killed by them in a raid is often an afterthought in such descriptions. Imperfect but one of the most visually beautiful films ever. And imbued with mysteries under its straightforward plot. Is Wayne’s character an archetype of those whom globalism will just not work (no matter their race)? It’s true for the Indians in most Ford films, who have their own identity group and are not depicted as wanting to join the white group. Leftist prefer native americans appearing in ‘buddy’ type adventures, ala Little Big Man or Dances With Wolves.
The Searchers dropped rank in the famed BFI Sight and Sound poll of 2022 . Forever ending debate as to whether polls are a reflection of the times, feminist ‘masterpiece’ Jeanne Dielman was rated greatest film of all time by critics. It depicts a woman’s suffering the agony of domestic routines such as food preparation (‘oppression’) filmed in real time. Director Chantal Akerman was an inter-sectional trifecta of Jewish feminist lesbian. As far as I know she never made a film about whether men also have jobs of drudgery and boredom when they are being scolded for cis-white-hetero-male-privilege-patriarchy. Perhaps the cognoscenti will rediscover Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948), which depicts some of the drudgery and poetry of poor Sicilian fishermen trying to eke out a living in tough economic times, and its effect on family breakdown. Maybe there’s more meaning there about group survival than the kvetching of Jeanne Dielman, filmed with grant money. Though both films are about the drudgery of putting food on the table.
Better forget the BFI Sight and Sound poll. It has become yet another propaganda tool for the lunatics.
There is a long-standing idea that leftists dominate the arts. All the more important for this website to keep shining light on important conservatives. As we are talking about westerns, much ore can be mined from the careers of Howard Hawks and John Ford. Hawks was an avowed conservative but also gave strong roles to women, so much so we have the term the Hawksian woman.
To say they don’t make them like John Ford anymore is a colossal understatement. Just a few years after Stagecoach he was shot in the arm film on site filming the Battle of Midway. No, not a Hollywood movie about Midway, the actual battle of Midway. Stephen Spielberg made a big budget movie about D-day. John Ford was actually there at D-day (there is some debate if he was there a day or two late or embellished how much footage was generated). I’m still waiting to see if Michael Moore, Shonda Rhimes or Ava DuVernay will take their schtick to Ukraine and get some hand held footage.
On the lighter side, Ford also directed Sex Hygiene (1942), sage advice to GIs on how to lube up a condom and avoid the clap, else get an injection of medicine squirted right up the urethra (it’s really in the film, but also some hilarious ‘symbolism’). Fortunately medicine got better for those afraid of ‘The Jab’.
Ford was also very clever to cut film footage in the camera and would avoid shooting to much material. His intent was to make it hard for studios and producers to meddle with his intentions in the editing room. Perhaps a lesson there to the modern right about leaving too much material that can be twisted out of context by the hysterical left.
And if the left tends to blame McCarthyism on the entire right, John Ford was very shrewd in opposing Cecil B DeMille and the directors guild, who were trying to fire Joseph Manciewicz for opposing an anti-communist loyalty oath. Maybe some of you think his position was a bad one. Well you can’t change history, but the story ought be retold more often nowadays… are enough on the left who believe there ought be some freedom of opinion in this era of censoring, deplatforming and turning people into pariahs… more extensively than even the McCarthy era? The newspeak recipe for civilization is focused on diversity first. Invite the world, put them all in a blender adjacent to the blades and hit puree, it’ll be great they say. Perhaps the slow cook recipe of the ‘melting pot’ worked better.
Thanks Jim, this is excellent. I welcome more discussions of John Ford at Counter-Currents.
I you are looking for other race-wise discussions of Ford, I recommend my reviews of
The Searchers
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Is “Trevor Lynch” a pen name? Or are the reviews yours in the sense of being published on your site?
https://counter-currents.com/product/trevor-lynchs-classics-of-right-wing-cinema/
At the bottom: Trevor Lynch is a pen name of Greg Johnson
Thank you.
David lean once said, “I learned from the great masters, and by that I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.”
I think it was Orson Welles who said that…
Welles reportedly watched Stagecoach over 40 times while preparing to make Citizen Kane.
Here’s John Candy’s impersonation of Welles.
I miss John Candy!
I just read Trevor Lynch’s online reviews of The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It is gratifying to read reviews of these well-known films by someone who approaches these stories from a different perspective than the usual boring and dishonest film commentary and critique.
I was particularly struck by these lines from The Searchers review:
“He [Ethan] may have to do things that render him unfit for civil society, so that others can enjoy it in innocence and peace.”
“Ford wants to confront liberals with the fact that their civilization could not have been built without illiberal men and illiberal deeds.”
Both of these statements ring a loud bell of truth for me. They highlight the crux of a very difficult and disturbing film and express a truly sophisticated perspective about the nature of the human condition, and what it takes to survive, let alone evolve. Everything comes with a price and the payment must be made by someone. There is no getting around that and it is immature and dangerous to pretend otherwise.
Although I don’t consider myself a liberal or a conservative, I have always thought that the liberal worldview has a limited—and therefore limiting—understanding of human nature. Conservatives often do too, but it is a given on the left side of the political spectrum. There is an unwillingness to acknowledge reality as well as a lack of gratitude for those who did things just so we may sleep at night.
And, this from the review of Liberty Valance:
“He’s the kind of man who needs killing, so decent people can plant crops, raise children, and sleep at night.”
I know this is a big leap from the landscape of the Wild West, but upon reading that, I immediately thought of the banking cartel and the mess they have made of everything over two centuries, and what may need to happen to correct the trajectory of Western nations (indeed, the whole world). I suspect many (on both sides) are thinking along similar lines, but not too many are willing to admit it and say it out loud. This is a shame because it’s just a fact of life: good people sometimes have to do bad things (or, do things that are perceived as bad from a limited perspective). This shouldn’t be a controversial thing to acknowledge on screen or at the dinner table.
The irony of it all is that artists (including storytellers) are supposed to be the ones providing insight into the human condition, and telling the “truth.” But most script writers and most film critics avoid doing just that.
I purchased Trevor Lynch’s book of film reviews and I look forward to reading it.
Feminists are always low-quality women and resentful women. Chantal Akerman is a slob who can’t cook.
Although I hate to spoil the general excitement over western movies, in a certain way most, if not all, are hyper-boring, because you know the outcome when you buy the ticket.
Trembling in your seat: Will the Stagecoach arrive at destination? Keep cool, of course it will, the coach is a delivery room, only lacking a midwife!
Will the lone sheriff cope with dangerous gunmen at High Noon ? Calm down and eat your pop corn, he will kill the four, one by one.
And I am not even mention the ridiculous ones, like They Call Me Trinity.
The point is not IF they make it, but HOW they make it.
Since 3000 years Europe’s most subtle play scripts deal with morally difficult situations:
Sophocles’ Antigone has to decide where morality is: bury her brother or obey the king’s edict.
Western and other US movies have no such moral quarrels:
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, in which a small group of people, having abandoned a vessel that was sunk by a Nazi U-boat ...
In order for the most stupid to understand which side to take, the oh-so-subtle Hitchcock needs NAZIs.
Yeah, but the lone Nazi on the lifeboat was portrayed sympathetically—and during World War II at that.
What’s your point and what do you expect? Hitchcock was from a nation at war with the “Nazis” in 1943, and at that time working for the US industry. There are certainly propagandistic elements in the movie.
Personally he was fond of Germany, having worked there in his youth in the 1920s, and he even spoke a bit of the language. When “Psycho” was released he made a German version of the trailer where he spoke himself and wasn’t dubbed as usual.
The “single bullet for the heroine” was understood to be a chivalric gesture. It was assumed no white woman would ever want to be taken alive by Indians. When one fort was almost ready to fall to the Indians, the women were taken into the magazine, and it was understood if the Indians won, the women were to be blown up. The fort, however, didn’t fall. But Ford does put some human motives into this act, and the film is probably the first real grown-up western.
As for Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, it wasn’t a rubber raft, it was a real wooden lifeboat. A problem in the film was that Walter Slezak, who was a captured U-boat crewman, came out as more heroic and strong than everyone else. It was partly to show him as the Nazi “superman,” but Hitch did that a little too well, and that the “allied” people were weak and lacking strength, as they kept dying off while Slezak lived…of course, he was killing off some of them. Tallulah Bankhead, in the cast, one day simply attacked Slezak and struck him, calling him a Nazi for no reason. Since Slezak had fled Hitler, he was shocked and hurt. Doesn’t really make me like her. Understand she was getting it on with blacks.
Claire Trevor and Wayne were a good match onscreen, and were later paired in the 18th century western Allegheny Uprising, which I reviewed for CC a couple of years ago.
I agree Wayne was a very good actor in his own way. “I don’t act,” he said, “I react.”
Chance: you must see more John Wayne movies. What kind of an American are you? More to the point: what kind of a CC reader are you?
An unusual role for Wayne was an early fifties film where he played a German skipper taking on the British. Odd, and a bit not up to snuff, but intriguing putting Wayne in that kind of role. One wonders how Wayne would have done Macbeth. A fun essay.
Well, jeepers, I didn’t expect so many of the comments to be focused on the meaning of Hatfield’s bullet, which to me was an extremely minor point about what a relatively minor character almost did to another relatively minor character.
To me, the major point was made in the last three paragraphs, especially the final one. It concerned the two major (and top-billed) characters:
There’s a racial and an ethical lesson in this. For Ringo and Dallas, the betrayal of their ethnic kinsmen stung far worse than any Apache’s arrow or any practical discomforts they may suffer by living in a foreign land.
Discuss.
I’d say the teaming up of Ringo and Dallas against all odds is partly a romantic Hollywood trope where heaven is entered once you have found the “right one”, and you don’t need anyone or anything else around to be happy.
Western movie characters are also typically individualistic and if they are not drifting around forever (“between the winds”) they are dreaming of leaving behind their violent past, settling down on their own little farm where they can sustain themselves and their family. The brave and honorable individualism of these characters is central to the genre’s emotional appeal I think.
Yes, there is betrayal by their own ethnic kinsmen, but also a sort of conspiracy by the good ones among them (Doc and Curley) to help them get away. But this is rather a moral solidarity than an ethnic solidarity, just as the bad guys are condemning Ringo and Dallas on moral grounds. Morality trumps ethnicity, as usual among white people.
There are often attacks on puritan hypocrisy in Ford’s movies. He is the one who would romanticize both mothers and hookers. Some argue that he never quite lost the critical immigrant-Irish perspective on the Anglos. He himself was a proud catholic of the folksy sort, enjoying traditions while never taking them too seriously. His love for the army and military ran along a similar line.
The moral solidarity of Doc and Curly of course being based not on abstract rules and societal decorum(as that of the hypocrites) but a sense of honor, friendship and fair play. Ringo and Dallas are deserving to get away in spite of what the law says, so they will let them.
I just realised that there is a second remake of “Stagecoach” made in 1986 and saw a few clips from it on Youtube. Nothing can trump the original, but this seems to be an enjoyable and well-made old school western. Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash work well together:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TITAbyObTw
Forgive me, but to come back briefly to that intriguing relationship between Mrs Mallory and Hatfield. One could say that she reminds him of a disappeared world, of his past and, why not, of his own womenfolk, and that she brings back the best in him. Ah, the power of some women when put to good…
I reconnected with a childhood acquaintance maybe 15 years ago, briefly and ill-advisedly. I knew he had taken the hippie route but that was decades ago.
The television was on and he began muttering to himself, visibly angry, flushing beet-red, the whole bit. One thing I caught was he spat sarcastically, “Oh, really, Marion?” a number of times.
I said, “Excuse me?”
He said, “That’s his real name.”
On the TV screen was a beaming John Wayne in full cowboy regalia in an advertisement for a John Wayne DVD set or something.
His real name is “Marion?” That burns my ass.
I thought about pointing out that Ringo’s name isn’t really Ringo but thought better of it. I certainly didn’t want to bring up Cedric The Entertainer or Ghostface Killah.
John Wayne is an American icon who stands for something and who horrible regular Americans find inspiring and enjoyable. That can’t just be left alone if you don’t care for him, it needs sneered at. No less an upstanding citizen as Ice-T once said of him, “He ain’t no hero, he killed Indians.”
Those were movies, Mr. T. And it’s “he isn’t a hero.” As a two-year-old would know.
How many blacks has John Wayne victimized? None. And Ice-T? Innumerable. He was a common criminal in his former life, a serious one.
Hippie/”beat” icon Jack Kerouac, who hated the hippie movement and fell out with Beat Generation cronies over their contempt for rank and file humanity, spoke of “a sadistic facetiousness and ‘sick joke’ grisliness about human affairs, a grotesque hatred for the humble and the suffering heart.”
He put the sea change in the culture at 1960.
“A new infernal mockery sniggering down the alleyways…”
He called them “the sneerers.”
A nieces’s husband’s Saturday ritual is watching a John Wayne marathon on TV. He’s a naval officer, the captain on one of those ships that are like floating cities, and more importantly, a phenomenal father who’s done so much for his kids and others’ and is an upbeat decent member in good standing of our family.
And happy.
The dour, pissy John Wayne-phobe spent his fifties scarring for life the children of his live-in girlfriend and died virtually alone, having betrayed everyone he’s ever come in contact with.
I remember an encounter with the same individual back in the Dark Ages. Memories that don’t age well.
Fats Domino put out a single on The Beatles’ Lady Madonna, which I thought was cool and so did The Beatles. I mentioned it to him and, again, with full-on red-faced anger, he snapped, “He doesn’t really mean it!”
See if you can work through the intricacies of The Golden Rule and then maybe you can advise us on who’s acceptable and who’s not.
And God forbid you sing “Monday’s child has learned to tie his bootlace” and not really mean it.
Wasn’t the best movement the precursor to the hippies? What was it about the hippies that irked Keruoac?
There is a great episode of Firing Line with a drunken Jack Kerouac and Ed Sanders from The Fugs discussing the hippies. Let’s just say that Jack wasn’t the comrade that Sanders expected him to be. It’s pretty hilarious, even if just to hear Buckley say “the topic tonight is the…hippies.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oaBnIzY3R00
Ha! Thanks.
Thanks for the link. Jack making fart noises was pretty funny. I’m guessing that was just part of the episode. It seems like Kerouac didn’t like the delivery of the hippies.
Doesn’t Jack take a couple shots at Ginsberg who’s in the audience?
To answer Josephus’ question, don’t know, really. Obviousness? Conformity? Blind following? The music? He was a big Charlie Parker fan. Wore a coat and tie. The difference in the movements in a word: acid.
How many blacks has John Wayne victimized?
Isn’t the blakes’ big beef with Wayne some interview he gave to Playboy where he said some truthful things that dare not be said? Poor babies are always getting butthurt over some insensitive white remark…
PLAYBOY: Angela Davis claims that those who would revoke her teaching credentials on ideological grounds are actually discriminating against her because she’s black. Do you think there’s any truth in that?
WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.
Also…
PLAYBOY: But isn’t it true that we’re never likely to rectify the inequities in our educational system until some sort of remedial education is given to disadvantaged minority groups?
WAYNE: What good would it do to register anybody in a class of higher algebra or calculus if they haven’t learned to count? There has to be a standard. I don’t feel guilty about the fact that five or 10 generations ago these people were slaves. Now, I’m not condoning slavery. It’s just a fact of life, like the kid who gets infantile paralysis and has to wear braces so he can’t play football with the rest of us. I will say this, though: I think any black who can compete with a white today can get a better break than a white man. I wish they’d tell me where in the world they have it better than right here in America.
Elsewhere in the interview he seems to make Jim’s same point about “cinematic blackness-at-gunpoint.”
Other John Wayne quotes from that Playboy interview:
The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven’t passed the tests and don’t have the requisite background.
Our so-called stealing of this country from them [Indians] was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
I don’t feel guilty about the fact that five or 10 generations ago these people were slaves….Now, I’m not condoning slavery. It’s just a fact of life, like the kid who gets infantile paralysis and has to wear braces so he can’t play football with the rest of us.
I’d like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I’d like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can’t understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim.
The entire interview is a fantastic time capsule.
Well, that does it. After the fish fry tonight I’m picking up some Guiness Stout and the missus and I are going to plop down and watch John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Erin Go Braugh!
Wayne was too successful in a certain type of role to avoid criticism and ribbing from his detractors. Remember that scene from Repo Man.
“John Wayne was a fag”, leading to the enraged response, “The hell he was!”
Clint Eastwood was careful to avoid getting stuck in the same genre and would play against type from time to time. Compare that to the Hep jeering that Charles Bronson and Steven Segal regularly get.
“Those who are most concerned with appearances, social status, and propriety turn out to be the film’s least ethical personages, while the most superficially shady or disreputable characters turn out to be the most honorable.”
Isn’t that the nature of our civilization? The upper classes practice a different kind of ethics. They must be world class deceivers to gain and remain in power.
In medieval Europe the Christian Church was instrumental in facilitating upper class ethic by proclaiming that the nobility were blessed by god and to go against the nobility is to go against god.
In our day and age mass media serves a similar purpose. Mass media exists as a means to facilitate upper class deception. The upper class have use it to destroy the west and install a new “multi-culture” hierarchy with themselves at the top.
Whoa! Some commenters are slandering the entire genre of westerns! You take chances, my friend. Big mouth don’t make a big man. We’re going to settle this like men! A duel at high noon, be ready. Remember, dying ain’t much of a living, boy.
What? It’s 2023, and we can’t settle this like men? We’re supposed to approach this in a gender neutral manner. A gender fluid manner? You’re telling me we have to settle this non-binary! I don’t thinks that’s what was meant by “I know enough about men to steer clear of them.”
No guns? Well how’s about some arm wrestling? What? You want to wrestle in the nude? The hell I will!
Alright, no physical contact in the duel. But the debate club sponsoring this isn’t what I had in mind. And there are rules about the panel of judges. We have to make sure there are at least several Asians, Jews, Blacks, Latinos, Inuits, Native Americans and a liberal white woman. Various groups overrepresented, and no white males allowed on the panel unless he has a rainbow tie or an NPR lapel pin. And we can’t do a duel in town square? How do we duel by video conference? And why do I need to bring my vaccination card? What the hell is certificate of completion for implicit bias training?
There are some things a man just can’t run away from, but this is one of them. Give me a good western! Even the predictable westerns have their pleasures. So be sure to see Red River, Lonesome Dove or Unforgiven. If you want something less predictable the later revisionist ones deliberately break the mold: Once Upon A Time In The West, The Wild Bunch or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. And scads of modern films are essentially thinly veiled westerns: No Country For Old Men, The Proposition, to most zombie movies. So slap some bacon on a biscuit and let’s go! We’re burnin daylight!
Tombstone with Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday.
Unpopular opinion: I liked the Kevin Costner Wyatt Earp movie better than Tombstone. Come at me.
My Darling Clementine beats them all.
I read once that there were more blanks fired(around 90,000) during the filming of The Wild Bunch than there were live rounds fired during the Mexican Revolution of 1916, around which the movie is loosely based. Definitely one of my top ten westerns.
This article inspired me to watch Stagecoach again last night (after a night of green beers).
It’s not just a great film. It is a beautiful film.
As for Jim Goad’s statement in his review of Stagecoach:
“There’s a racial and an ethical lesson in this. For Ringo and Dallas, the betrayal of their ethnic kinsmen stung far worse than any Apache’s arrow or any practical discomforts they may suffer by living in a foreign land.”
I will have to reflect on that a little more. I am feeling too deeply the sting of betrayal by many of my fellow European Whites in the United States right now to be able to calmly “discuss” betrayal in any other situation, whether it be vis-à-vis the social classes/hierarchy within a group or a society, between lovers, or in the bigger picture of a contest for Western Civilization. Betrayal burns, doesn’t it?
I still believe we will somehow cross this landscape and get to that station, the one that preserves Western Civilization and our race (because they are one and the same). We will survive this madness. Because sooner or later the instinct to survive will kick in with a vengeance, and good men willing to do “bad” things will suddenly appear and shoot the savages (and, I hope, the betrayers).
Aside from the story and its meaning, Stagecoach is an objectively beautiful film. Everything was done well: the casting, the acting, the writing, the dialogue, the landscape, the directing, all of it. It’s one of those rare films that deserves the description “cinematic.” Even for people who are not “into” the Western genre, this is one you must see if you love motion pictures.
A young Stephen Spielberg recounts a memorable encounter with John Ford in his latest film, The Fabelmans. David Lynch was enlisted to play the cantankerous Ford and it might be all that’s needed to see.
Spielberg claims he watches a John Ford film before he sets to film all his movies, especially Stagecoach and The Searchers. I would have pegged Spielberg to be a Stagecoach devotee, as its tight plot, storytelling clarity and kineticism were a huge influence to him and mainstream Hollywood. Stagecoach is one stop shopping on how to make a movie. Love or hate Spielberg’s type of film, he’s canny and disciplined at what he does and doesn’t often squander a big budget.
I would have pegged David Lynch to be a The Searchers dedicatee, though it’s hard to prove as he usually waxes on Sunset Boulevard, Sirk and Fellini (though The Straight Story is a little bit Stagecoach set on riding lawnmower). But as Lindsay Anderson said of John Ford, Stagecoach is prose and My Darling Clementine is poetry (as is The Searchers). Who would want to dispense entirely with novels and poems when we might have both. Though I worry Spielberg may want to do his own version of Stagecoach someday, making it woke as his did to West Side Story. Instead of it being a white vs. Puerto Rican gangs who are enemies, the new version takes the perspective that the whites are a bad guys instead of a more neutral perspective of Romeo and Juliet. As Spielberg said, the new version is about “Contemporary values“.
Check out ‘Rio Conchos’ w/Richard Boone – full movie was/is on ewe-tube.
Here it is :
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gk9Z_fdzG9g. [1h 47m]
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