The John Ford Stagecoach (1939) is a movie to be treasured, not analyzed. Its enormous virtues have more to do with the way it was made than what it is about, whether the characters are well-written, or how much sense certain scenes make. Stagecoach is not sensible, it is a movie; and it is the kind of movie than Americans do best and which no one else can touch.
Ford was a great primtive artist, not a thinker. In Stagecoach we see him at his best. He blends action and emotion seamlessly; and has the one virtue that all great directors possess whatever their subject matter or level of sophistication: he knows exactly where to place the camera. This may seem like a minor virtue to literary-minded critics and viewers, but it is as much as anything what Ford is about. Stagecoach is, among other things, one perfectly photographed and acted scene after the other; with the camera, whether discreet or close at hand, always positioned for maximum effect, which in this film is as much musical as visual. Stagecoach is among Ford's most graceful films. It is also perhaps his least pedantic.
The actors, whether sitting, standing, jumping, riding, talking, shooting, giving birth or dropping dead, are at all times where they ought to be on screen. How they go through their motions constitutes the bulk of the movie. We are not told how characters feel through dialogue; it is shown to us, vividly. The later scenes in Lordsburg are staged almost like a ballet; a ballet in the dark. Whether in a crowded saloon or an empty street we experience the movements of the principle characters, as well as the denizens of the town, often accompanied by music, some of it underscoring, some of it from an upright barroom piano, all of it relevant to the feeling of the story and the film. This is not a smart movie of the kind they make today. What irony there is is none too impressive; and the dialogue is not clever. It works at a different, almost subconscious level; and what one of its characters says about the young couple riding off to freedom in the end could be said of the entire movie, saved as it is, from the blessings of civilization.
Ford was a great primtive artist, not a thinker. In Stagecoach we see him at his best. He blends action and emotion seamlessly; and has the one virtue that all great directors possess whatever their subject matter or level of sophistication: he knows exactly where to place the camera. This may seem like a minor virtue to literary-minded critics and viewers, but it is as much as anything what Ford is about. Stagecoach is, among other things, one perfectly photographed and acted scene after the other; with the camera, whether discreet or close at hand, always positioned for maximum effect, which in this film is as much musical as visual. Stagecoach is among Ford's most graceful films. It is also perhaps his least pedantic.
The actors, whether sitting, standing, jumping, riding, talking, shooting, giving birth or dropping dead, are at all times where they ought to be on screen. How they go through their motions constitutes the bulk of the movie. We are not told how characters feel through dialogue; it is shown to us, vividly. The later scenes in Lordsburg are staged almost like a ballet; a ballet in the dark. Whether in a crowded saloon or an empty street we experience the movements of the principle characters, as well as the denizens of the town, often accompanied by music, some of it underscoring, some of it from an upright barroom piano, all of it relevant to the feeling of the story and the film. This is not a smart movie of the kind they make today. What irony there is is none too impressive; and the dialogue is not clever. It works at a different, almost subconscious level; and what one of its characters says about the young couple riding off to freedom in the end could be said of the entire movie, saved as it is, from the blessings of civilization.