Stagecoach

Stagecoach (1939) puts nine passengers in a coach and sends them across Apache territory. They have nothing in common: a prostitute, a drunken doctor, an escaped convict, a pregnant officer's wife, a banker. The whole design is a sealed box in which classes are forced to talk to each other. Ford's insistence on John Wayne decided the film. Producer Walter Wanger objected, wanting Gary Cooper instead and Marlene Dietrich as Dallas. Ford would not give up the actor, though he conceded top billing to Claire Trevor, far better known than Wayne at the time. The film made Wayne a star. Studios had turned the project down. Big budget westerns had been out of fashion since the silent era and Ford had not made one in years. Wanger eventually put up 250,000 dollars, less than Ford had asked for. It was the first western Ford shot in Monument Valley. The crew was billeted in Kayenta, Arizona, at 5,700 feet, in spartan conditions. Orson Welles said he watched it more than forty times while preparing Citizen Kane and called it a perfect textbook of filmmaking. It won two Oscars, Best Supporting Actor for Thomas Mitchell and Best Scoring. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: classic westerns, ensemble storytelling, and film history. Less good for: the Apache exist only as a threat and the film never questions that. The character types feel familiar now because everything afterwards copied them from here.