American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (13 page)

Andy Devine plays Buck, the stagecoach driver, while the marshal looks for Ringo (Ward Bond was Ford’s first choice to play Buck but said he couldn’t drive the coach for the film’s necessary long shots; most of the medium shots were done with a fake stagecoach on springs, and using rear projection). Physically soft, he is the opposite of the lean and tough Ringo kid.

John Carradine is the elegant white-hatted “Hatfield,” a southern gentleman and degenerate gambler in search of new worlds (and bank accounts) to plunder. Henry Gatewood, the stiff, brusque, white-haired Berton Churchill, is a bank clerk who is absconding with $50,000 of the bank’s money. Both their lives are ruled and ruined by money—one wants it, one has it, both steal it. Thomas Mitchell is Doc Boone, a drunken doctor from the North, a veteran of the Civil War whose skills have been corroded by alcohol. Salesman Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek, known for playing soft but sensitive characters) sells whiskey. One is a man whose life has been ruined by alcohol; the other a man who makes his living off it.

When they begin their treacherous journey, they are warned by a young cavalry officer, Lieutenant Branchard (Tim Holt), that Geronimo is on the warpath; therefore his troops will accompany the coach, but only as far as their destination, the fort at Dry Fork. Early along the way, Ringo is found walking along the trail after his horse has gone lame. Ford gives Wayne an unmistakable star entrance, as the camera swoops down from the POV of the marshal to the smiling and beautiful face of the squinty-eyed, grinning Ringo.

During production, Ford had wanted Wayne to do something special. They came up with twirling his rifle in a circle, the barrel passing under his right armpit. The only problem was, the rifle was too long. Ford then had a few inches chopped from the tip of the rifle so Wayne could perform the trick. It was a decision and a moment fraught with meaning. That single, swooping shot, with the camera high above Ringo (which also signals Ford’s control of Wayne by keeping him below eye-level in the shot), the gun twirl was at once a symbol of the Ringo Kid’s toughness, and an extension of his manhood, a preening, phallic moment (which makes Ford’s “cutting” of the gun even more significant). The rifle was what got Ringo in trouble and will also serve as the weapon of his redemption. The twirling became a signature move for Wayne, copied by endless other “cowboys,” and used by Wayne again most notably when he twirls his pistol in
The Searchers
just before he tries to kill Debbie (in that film, the gesture hints at a repressed sexual desire for her, one more reason Ethan Edwards has to kill her).

It was a striking move by Wayne, and gave him a moment of sexuality he otherwise rarely displayed in most of his films, where his strength was usually married to his stoicism. It is one of the reasons Wayne remained an action star rather than a romantic one.

Although Curly must eventually arrest Ringo for murder, he allows him to join the other passengers. Not long after, Ringo finds himself attracted to Dallas; this moment signals the beginning of his redemption, and hers.

After arriving at Dry Fork, the cavalry must go on by itself to Apache Wells, to fight Geronimo’s band of warriors. The stagecoach passengers vote on whether to turn back. The majority decides they should continue on to Apache Wells unescorted, intending to reunite once again with the cavalry. Along the way, Lucy then goes into labor, and a shaky Doc Boone delivers the baby, another act of self-redemption. As Dallas emerges from the makeshift delivery room in the stagecoach holding the newborn, Ringo is moved by her maternal caring and affection and knows now that he loves her.

When the stage reaches its next intended destination, Lee’s Ferry (each act of the screenplay is neatly divided by these stops), the passengers find it decimated by the Apaches. At this point, Curly releases Ringo from his cuffs, so he can cut and attach logs to help float the wagon across the river. Just as it appears everything is going to be all right, the Apache furiously attack, and Ringo heroically jumps on the lead horse to help steer the wagon train (most but not all of the stunts here were done by Yakima Canutt).
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Then the cavalry arrives to save the day, in one of the most rousing rescues ever filmed, and the surviving passengers complete their trip to Lordsburg.

There is, however, unfinished business, as Ringo must now face Luke Plummer (Tom Tyler) and make him answer for the murder of Ringo’s brother and father. He cannot start a new life with Dallas until this act of vengeance is fulfilled. The marshal knows it, and does not try to stop him. The final shoot-out in the empty streets of Lordsburg is beautifully staged and dramatically exciting. We do not see the actual gunfight, only the start of it as Ringo hits the dirt. And we do not see the end of it, only the result, when Plummer pushes his way back through the swinging doors of the bar, apparently the victor, until he falls forward, dead. The film ends happily, as Ringo and Dallas redemptively escape the shadow of death and ride off into the sunset.

There are seeds of several Ford/Wayne films to come planted in
Stagecoach.
Ringo anticipates Ethan Edwards in
The Searchers
with his determined vengeance; the attack on the wagon train by the Indians anticipates the cinematic formalism of the Indian attacks in
Fort Apache, The Searchers,
and
The Horse Soldiers;
and the courage of migration is once again on display in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
. These Ford signature stylistics would be repeated over and over with and by Wayne, as each refined his personal style through the other.

It is in
Stagecoach
that Ford finally found the cinematic persona he had been searching for to replace Harry Carey. Wayne had Carey’s toughness, stoicism, and all-American strength and the charm (if not the wit) of Will Rogers. Together, Ford and Wayne would make the best films of both their careers, as Wayne visualized Ford’s characters, and Ford deepened Wayne’s character and his own. According to Andrew Sarris: “
Stagecoach
has been clarified and validated by what followed [in both Ford’s and Wayne’s careers]. Its durability as a classic is attributable not so much to what people thought about it at the time as to what Ford himself spun off from it in his [and Wayne’s] subsequent career.”

Ford’s direction was tough and unforgiving and illustrated those aspects of the director’s personality that had always been so off-putting. He appeared to take sadistic pleasure belittling Wayne in front of everyone, grabbing him under the chin and humiliating him for acting like a statue (to get, he later claimed, the best performance possible out of him). The more Ford dished it out, the more Wayne took it, which in turn made Ford dish it out all that much more. The first day of shooting he called Wayne a “dumb bastard, a “big oaf,” and made fun of his acting: “Can’t you even walk, for chrissake, instead of skipping like a goddamn fairy?” Wayne secretly sought both consolation and coaching from his old friend and stage director Paul Fix. After his daily tongue-lashings from Ford, Wayne would meet with Paul at his house in Hollywood to rehearse the following day’s shoot.

According to Patricia Bosworth, “With this film Ford took the western from pulp status into one of the greatest American movie genres of the Twentieth Century . . . Wayne was mesmerizing as the naïve young outlaw seeking redemption . . . but Ford baited him cruelly during the shooting and made fun of all the ‘B’ movies he’d been in . . . Nobody could ever figure out why Duke took so much abuse from Ford . . . years later Wayne told Maurice Zolotow that he thought Ford was simply after artistic perfection . . . ‘Sure he got me angry,’ he said about the making of
Stagecoach
. ‘He would turn me inside and out. First of all he was making me feel emotions and he knew he couldn’t get a good job out of me unless he shook me up so damn hard I’d forget I was working with big stars like Thomas Mitchell and Claire Trevor. I was insecure . . . He also knew that putting a relatively unknown actor like me in a key role, well, there’s an unconscious resentment among the veteran actors; there has to be . . . Mr. Ford wanted to get these veterans rooting for me and rooting for the picture, not resenting me [so] he deliberately kicked me around, but he got the other actors on my side.’ For reasons that remain mysterious, Ford at his most creative was often his most mysterious.”

So iconic is the mise-en-scène of this film that its stagecoach rescue by the cavalry—the confrontation between Manifest Destiny and the guerrilla tactics of the Native Americans—became part of the basic vernacular of Western movies, the heroics of the good (white) men against the bad (Indians).
Stagecoach
is, in every way, a classic of American cinema.

STAGECOACH
OPENED FEBRUARY 15, 1939,
the start of what has often been described as the greatest year in the history of Hollywood. Also released in that twelve-month period were Victor Fleming’s (and George Cukor and Sam Wood’s)
Gone with the Wind,
Frank Capra’s
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
Fleming’s
The Wizard of Oz,
Ernst Lubitsch’s
Ninotchka,
William Wyler’s
Wuthering Heights,
Henry King’s
Jesse James,
George Stevens’s
Gunga Din,
George Marshall’s
Destry Rides Again,
and Ford’s own
Drums Along the Mohawk.
In this crowded group of official greatness,
Stagecoach
stands tall.

If the failure of
The Big Trail
initiated a decade of B westerns and relegated Wayne to playing two-dimensional caricatures rather than three-dimensional characters,
Stagecoach
restored respectability to both him and the genre. And to Ford.
Stagecoach
confirmed Ford’s cinema was a poetic sound-and-sight medium capable of realism and emotion in a way that was (and still is) at once contemporary, historical, and ultimately timeless. Ford balanced his shots of the stagecoach beneath the western skies and the expanse of Monument Valley with the interior scenes shot in expressionist deep focus and with low ceilings; it is this clash of the free, great outdoors and the confines of civilized living that creates a visual conflict that is a confrontational as any of the physical battles in the film.

It is also impossible to separate the physical film from Ford’s passion for making it. The director put up a furious fight to keep the shooting script intact. The chief censor of the Production Code Administration, or PCA, Joe Breen, wanted Ford to eliminate Dallas’s character completely, although in the script she is never referred to as a prostitute and is seen being run out of town by the women of “the Law and Order League.” Breen also disapproved of the marshal letting Ringo go free at the end, and with Dallas. According to production papers related to the film on file at the Academy Library in Beverly Hills, California, after a long and protracted battle with Ford, Breen did not give final approval to the shooting script and an official seal of approval until two weeks before production began.

THE FILM PREMIERED SIMULTANEOUSLY AT
the Fox Westwood Theater in Los Angeles, on the lip of UCLA’s campus, and at Radio City Musical Hall in New York. The response was unanimous; the public loved it and so did the critics.
Variety
raved about “[t]he beauty of
Stagecoach,
not in its action nor its story, but in the powerful contrasts of personalities, the maturing of characters and the astounding suspense that director Ford achieves.”
Life
magazine described it as “
Grand Hotel
on wheels,” and Archer Winston, in the
New York Post,
called it “[t]he best western since talking pictures began. It is so beautiful and exciting that maybe it ought not to be called ‘A Western.’ ” William K. Everson, in his excellent history of westerns, called it “[a] superb film [that] caught the imagination of both critics and public. It was both entertainment and poetry, and it made an instant star of John Wayne. More to the point, it was directly responsible for the biggest single cycle of large-scale Westerns that the movies had ever known.” Frank Nugent wrote in the
New York Times
: “In one superbly expansive gesture . . . John Ford has swept aside ten years of artifice and talkie compromise and has made a motion picture that sings a song with his camera. It moves, and how beautifully, across the plains of Arizona, skirting the sky-reaching mesas of Monument Valley, beneath the piled-up cloud banks, which every photographer dreams about.”

As Roberts and Olson stated in their biography of John Ford, first in
Stagecoach
and then ever after, John Ford, with the help of his cameraman Bert Glennon, “transformed Monument Valley into the archetypal Western landscape . . . lone, haunting, a land that dwarfs people, plays tricks on the human eye and seems undaunted by civilization.” According to Ford, “My favorite location [became] Monument Valley. It has rivers, mountains, plains, desert, everything the land can offer. I feel at peace there. I have been all over the world, but I consider this the most complete, beautiful, and peaceful place on earth.”
⁵⁸

The success of the film reached across the Atlantic and was given the star treatment by that most eminent of French film critics, André Bazin. In his groundbreaking
What Is Cinema?
he wrote that “
Stagecoach
was the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection. John Ford struck the ideal balance among social myth, historical reconstruction, psychological truth and the traditional Western
mise-en-scène
.
Stagecoach
is like a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position.”

And François Truffaut, wearing his critic’s hat, recognized the link between
Stagecoach
and Welles’s
Citizen Kane
: “Orson Welles has never sought to conceal what he gained from seeing other films brought to him, particularly John Ford’s
Stagecoach,
which he says he saw many times before shooting
Kane
. In
Stagecoach,
John Ford systematically showed ceilings each time the characters left the stagecoach to enter a way station. I imagine that John Ford in fact filmed these scenes to create a contrast with the long shots of the stagecoach’s journey, where the sky inevitably occupied a large portion of the screen.”