CHAPTER 4

Landscape and Standard-Setting in the 1930s Western

“The Big Trail” and “Stagecoach”

Western mythology had emerged and been given shape by author James Fenimore Cooper, and then by storytellers in the years following the Civil War, as much as a half century before Griffith and Ford staged their first filmed shoot-outs. By concentrating on this not-too-distant past, the last half of the nineteenth century, the Western has led people to believe that it is a vital record, or at least a meaningful interpretation, of America's expansionist history. That history began well before the Civil War and was intimately connected with the geography of the country. All told, no breed of film developed as rich and universally popular an appreciation for a regional or national geography as did the Western.

The American nation has long been preoccupied by the manipulation of its spaces. Historically, if the frontier wilderness has been a major preoccupation of the colonies, territories, and nation, it is because Americans value themselves as adept organizers of their spaces, with the goal of structuring space so as to accommodate a broad range of needs and desires. Politicians, military strategists, fur traders, gold-seekers, explorers, naturalists, geologists, and engineers grappled with organizing the wilderness, paving the way for ranchers, farmers, and townspeople. Since the time Columbus and other explorers reached North and Central America in the fifteenth century, America has been a frontier culture, or perhaps better said, a culture of many frontiers.

By its explorers, geologists, photographers, and painters, the American West was perceived as a wilderness, rich in natural monuments and awesome in scale. To its settlers, it offered a landscape, a “vast unit of human habitation, indeed a jurisdiction,” the kind of landscape to which the historian Simon Schama's tracing of the term landskip can be applied. This term appeared in colloquial English not long after Columbus reached the New World and revealed, to the acquisitive and highly competitive European empires of the sixteenth century, new lands to be taken.1 Deborah A. Carmichael summarizes the settlement process in the introduction to her collection The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre:

In the stories of settlement on a new continent, which appeared first in literature and then in the movies, the natural world posed the possibility of both danger and profit…. The need for land began the move from spiritual to secular goals of nation-building in a new world, and this adjustment also changed the American relationship with the environment. Westward expansion grew as the population grew (early in the tentative settlement of the continent). Thomas Jefferson took delight in the increase of Virginia inhabitants, noting, “In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant.” Thus began the independent, landowning tradition that underpins American identity—a yeoman agriculturalist (albeit, today, a gardener in a suburban backyard) ready to advance and conquer a limitless continent of natural resources.²

The expansionist movement that opened the American continent to settlement by colonists and pioneers concluded around the time of the birth of the motion picture in America. The Western spaces created or found by the filmmakers, inside the studio or on location in particular landscapes, repeatedly combined artificial, contrived, and natural forms in ways that were deliberate. These filmmakers paralleled those painters who created portraits of frontier landscapes and the activities of cowboys and Indians: Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and Charles Schreyvogel, to name but several.³ There were also those influential landscape photographers—including Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Jack Hillers, and Timothy O'Sullivan—who “recorded” mountains and plains, valleys and canyons and rivers, often in the manner of the European Romantic painters.⁴ It is not surprising, then, that certain filmmakers assembled shots of actual locations and of studio settings to convey a sense of a real Western terrain that followed in the artistic tradition suggested here. And so the American public's aesthetic appreciation of the Western landscape had its own pattern of cultural evolution, as Edward Buscombe makes clear in his book on Ford's Stagecoach: “Many of the cultural meanings we now invest in landscapes are of comparatively recent origin. Prior to the late eighteenth century, the aesthetic sensibility was not pleasurably stimulated by vast panoramas, towering cliffs, limitless vistas. The absence of human habitation was regarded with distaste.”⁵

Preoccupied by frontier myths and histories, writers depended on descriptions of terrain to distinguish character and to color personality. Sometimes the landscape is but incidental background, but in other works it is an active force, as with Dorothy Scarborough's The Wind (see chapter 2). The landscape seems like nothing without its inhabitants; the people and the wildlife are inseparable from their physical environment. It may be sparsely populated, but an entirely empty West can have no meaning for us—though the temporary sense of emptiness as evoked by a barren landscape can have a powerful and alienating emotional effect. The land exists to be occupied, or so humankind determined long ago, with its spaces to be organized for use.

LANDSCAPE AS A PHYSICAL AND MORAL UNIVERSE

A landscape-oriented movie may be called a “filmscape” in the sense of the “wedding” of a filmmaker and region. In the Western genre, examples are Ford and Monument Valley, Hawks and the Missouri River, John Sturges and wooded terrain, Anthony Mann and the mountains, and Eastwood and the Northwest. Other landscape-oriented movies, beyond the parameters of the Western genre, include the breathtaking German mountain films of Leni Riefenstahl and her mentor Arnold Fanck; the masterfully crafted documentaries of Robert Flaherty; Satyajit Ray's lovingly made films depicting everyday life in his native country of India; Akira Kurosawa's samurai masterworks; and Jean Renoir's exquisitely photographed portraits of the French countryside in Day in the Country (1936) and Rules of the Game (1939), not to mention his gorgeously framed shots of India in The River (1951).

The contemporary German director Werner Herzog, a dedicated filmscape-creator who has crafted such awe-inspiring adventure movies as Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) and such fascinating documentaries as Grizzly Man (2005) and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), got to the heart of the Western genre's intimate affinity for landscape when he was asked about his own particular usage of a jungle setting in Aguirre:

In my films landscapes are never just picturesque or scenic backdrops as they often are in Hollywood films…. It [the jungle] is not just a location, it is a state of our mind. It has almost human qualities. It is a vital part of the characters' inner landscapes…. I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals. People think I am joking, but it is true. Often I try to introduce into a landscape a certain atmosphere, using sound and vision to give it a definite character. Most directors merely exploit landscapes to embellish what is going on in the foreground, and this is one reason why I like some of John Ford's work. He never used Monument Valley as merely a backdrop, but rather to signify the spirit of his characters. Westerns are really all about our very basic notions of justice, and when I see Monument Valley in his films I somehow start to believe—amazingly enough—in American justice.⁶

Authentic Western landscapes had certainly been used as far back as D. W. Griffith's Biograph Westerns after 1910, when Griffith's company of actors and crew members began to make regular treks to California in order to take advantage of the climate, particularly during the winter months. Ford and Raoul Walsh, two landscape-oriented directors, had made scores of films in the silent era, and Ford's early Straight Shooting is a clear example of a pre-1920 Western that takes advantage of outdoor shooting so as to convey some sense of the Western terrain (see chapter 1). Ford's The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919) was praised by the film periodical Photoplay for its main actor's performance, but especially for its director's special gift for outdoor imagery: “Two remarkable things [about the film] are Harry Carey's rise to real acting power, and director Ford's marvelous river locations and absolutely incomparable photography. This photoplay is an optic symphony.”⁷ And as noted in chapter 1, Ford made brilliant use of authentic Western terrain in his two great silent epics of the 1920s, The Iron Horse and 3 Bad Men.

The filmscape as a fusion of human nature and natural setting came to special prominence with the rise of the big-budget A-Western, most especially in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Film scholars have established a familiar distinction between large-scale, typically superior-quality A-Westerns and their usually less costly, mediocre-quality counterparts, the B-Westerns. B-Westerns, especially those churned out by the Hollywood studios at an astonishing rate during the 1930s, were primarily low-cost, quickly produced profit-makers geared toward weekend matinee audiences who were satisfied with rapid action, hokey dialogue, and familiar stars such as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. And it was the 1930s B-Western that gave John Wayne a frequent home between his starring roles in two major A-Westerns that bookended the decade: Walsh's The Big Trail (1930) and Ford's Stagecoach (1939), two films that serve as focal points of this chapter.

A good many of the A-Westerns, because they were chiefly funded by the major studios, tended to be filmed, at least partly, in the great outdoors of the West and Southwest. Because of travel and transportation costs, on-location shooting in distant places was typically far more expensive than filming in a studio, therefore requiring major investment. Authentic Western landscapes became more and more prominent in many of the A-Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly when contrasted with the cheaply made B-Westerns.⁸ It is true that some of the B-Westerns of the Depression era took advantage of outdoor location shooting in the immediate sunny Southern California terrain, primarily because it was ready to hand and required little effort or expense in making these landscapes anything other than secondary backdrops for action sequences. In the B-Westerns, however, there was usually no reach for jaw-dropping beauty or a sense of the sublime. And there were also few attempts to make the landscape a thematic component of a B-Western narrative, whether as obstacle, inspiration, or metaphor.

But with the A-Western “renaissance” of the late 1930s and early 1940s came a renewed emphasis on the photographic use of real-world environments that could play as significant a role in a motion picture as the performances of the lead actors. Despite the occasional insertion of fairly artificial shots and scenes that were filmed on the studio lot, many of the World War II-era A-Westerns contain scenes of such authentic natural beauty that they sometimes seem like quick-moving slideshows of masterful landscape paintings by the likes of Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt. Several of the influential A-Western directors of this period—Ford, Walsh, Henry King, William Wyler, King Vidor, Fritz Lang—had long exhibited a painterly sensibility, beginning with their work in the era of silent film.

The connection between Romantic landscape artistry and cinematic Westerns is more than a loose analogy. In his epic biography Searching for John Ford, Joseph McBride offers evidence of the Ford-Remington connection when he describes one of Ford's early silents, Hell Bent (1918, with Harry Carey Sr.), as beginning with a writer who admires Remington's 1897 painting A Misdeal, an artwork that the movie then attempts to “imitate” to some degree.⁹ The biographer discusses Ford's familiarity with Remington and Russell when he describes the making of Ford's silent epic The Iron Horse, the story of the building of the transcontinental railroad. He also reveals the strong influence of the Western paintings of Remington, Russell, and Schreyvogel on Ford when the director came to make the first two films of his cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.¹⁰ McBride informs us:

Ford acknowledged that his principal visual influence for Fort Apache was Frederic Remington, whom he had first imitated in the 1918 Hell Bent. Remington's starkly beautiful paintings of cavalrymen, often tragic in tone, provided inspiration for the entire Cavalry Trilogy, along with the more romantic Western paintings of Charles M. Russell. Russell's colorful landscapes and Indian scenes were imitated by Ford in his magnificent imagery of Indians on the march in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The Western painter Charles Schreyvogel, a rival of Remington's, also left his imprint on the director. “My father kept a copy of a collection by Schreyvogel close by his bedside,” Pat Ford recalled. “He pored over it to dream up action sequences for his films.”¹¹

It is true that natural settings in many of the paintings by artists like Remington, Russell, and Schreyvogel are subordinated to the human action occurring within them, and so these artworks are less Romantic than the non-human-centered artworks of, say, those of the Hudson River school painters. Sometimes Remington's depictions of Western landscapes even appear abstract in contrast with the detailed attention afforded to the human figures placed against those backdrops. But this does not diminish the fact that such paintings taught filmmakers like Ford and Walsh to appreciate the visual ways in which westerners and their natural environments are typically conceived or imagined simultaneously. And such artworks also inspired certain filmmakers to capture the sense of gritty authenticity that these painters evoked when capturing the physical action and motion of westerners and their animals.

In a retrospective interview that he gave late in his life at the American Film Institute, Walsh was asked about the visual similarities between his depictions of some of the action scenes featuring General Custer (Errol Flynn) in They Died with Their Boots On (1941) and the depictions of similar Custer-related scenes in paintings by Remington and Russell. Walsh declared, “I'd seen all the Remingtons and I knew Russell. When I was a young boy, my father introduced me to Remington, and I knew the groupings [of people] and the different things.”¹² And while Walsh-directed Westerns such as Dark Command (1940), Pursued (1947), Cheyenne (1947), Silver River (1948), and Colorado Territory (1949) gave visual evidence of the influence of such painters, it was Walsh's earliest A-Western, The Big Trail (1930), that truly demonstrated the director's affinity with these artists and, at least indirectly, with the Romantic landscape painters who had inspired them.

THE BIG TRAIL

Almost a decade before Ford's landmark Stagecoach, two movies helped to blaze a path into the history of the Old West's wagon train pioneers. Wesley Ruggles's adaptation of Edna Ferber's Cimarron (1931), starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne, was successful at the box office and won the Oscar for Best Picture, the first Western film to win this award (the second was Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, almost sixty years later). But the other tale of settlers on “prairie schooners”—Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail of a year earlier—was the more accomplished film in terms of its on-site utilization of the natural landscape and its subsequent emphasis on the intimate connection between frontier folk and the land.

If The Wind masterfully brought to a close the silent Western of the 1920s, The Big Trail daringly initiated the epic sound Western. An ambitious undertaking, it failed financially, causing the genre to endure a decadelong eclipse until the release of Ford's Stagecoach and other classic A-Westerns of 1939, such as Henry King's Jesse James, Michael Curtiz's Dodge City, and Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific. Walsh—like Ford, Vidor, King, Wyler, and other great directors of Hollywood's studio era—got his start in the formative years of silent cinema, where he worked as both actor and director. D. W. Griffith, his mentor, cast him in an uncredited minor role as John Wilkes Booth in his landmark Birth of a Nation (1915). During that same year Walsh directed well over a dozen short features, which included three Westerns: The Lone Cowboy, A Bad Man and Others, and The Greaser.

For The Big Trail, Walsh utilized Twentieth Century Fox's new seventy-millimeter Grandeur widescreen process to hold steadily and boldly a series of broad panoramic views of such natural wonders as monstrous cliffs near the Sierra Nevada that challenged the pioneers in the film's most thrilling sequence.¹³ The narrative follows a wagon train from the Missouri River to Oregon Territory in the 1840s. Walsh took cast and crew on locations for months: Yuma, Arizona; Sacramento, Sequoia National Park, and the Sierra Nevada in California; Jackson Hole and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming; Montana; and Utah. As the wagon train crosses the country, we experience the mess and mud of the camps along with the harsher tasks of avoiding stampeding buffalo and defending against Indian attacks.

Walsh cast John Wayne in his first starring role, that of a scout who leads the wagon train as he seeks frontier justice. He hunts down the men who killed his best friend, establishing a revenge-motivated character whom he would portray most meaningfully in later Westerns directed by Ford (Stagecoach, The Searchers) and Howard Hawks (Red River). Before The Big Trail, Wayne worked primarily as an extra and a bit player, especially in Ford's films of the late 1920s. Wayne served as an uncredited extra (as well as prop assistant at times) on Ford's Mother Machree (1928), Four Sons (1928), Hangman's House (1928), The Black Watch (1929), Salute (1929), Men without Women (1930), and Born Reckless (1930). Wayne got to know Ford and thought of him as something of a role model.¹⁴ It was most likely the combination of Ford, Walsh, and silent Western star Harry Carey Sr.—three similarly self-assured and life-loving men—who gave Wayne his blend of folksy charm, quiet bravado, and wry humor.

FIGURE 16. John Wayne is the revenge-seeking and nature-loving frontiersman Breck Coleman in Raoul Walsh's epic The Big Trail (1930). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

FIGURE 17. Frontier settlers gather and enjoy a communal dance, enclosed by their covered wagons and the surrounding forest, in The Big Trail. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Walsh was a master storyteller with an unpretentious visual style and unmannered pacing that gave his Westerns a sense of seamlessness and a deceptively easy beauty. He knew as well as any artist where to place river, mountain, and sky. What distinguished his vision of a country waiting to be made into a landscape was his grasp of scale, depth, and light. The camera looked at and across wagons and terrain; the resulting compositions revealed a calm majestic spread of natural features. Another Western epic derived from an actual event, and as sweeping and visually engaging, would not be made until Red River. In that one, which depicts the first cattle drive from Texas to Abilene, Wayne and the character of the mythical westerner, following his youthful adventures in The Big Trail and Stagecoach, become forever joined (see chapter 6).

The Big Trail's production was as burdened as its fictional pioneers. Each scene of the film was shot several times for different versions: first shot in Grandeur widescreen, and then in standard thirty-five millimeter in multiple-language versions with different casts. If this were not complicated enough, there were also the great challenges, physical as well as financial, of hauling cumbersome equipment, of filming with sound using microphones hidden among barrels and wagons, and of moving hundreds of cast, crew, and animals. Studio boss William Fox had initiated the use of this widescreen process and owned the equipment that could project the film stock required by the new method. It was a major investment on his part that in many ways was far ahead of its time, anticipating the widescreen technology of the 1950s like Cinemascope, Vista Vision, and Cinerama. Unfortunately, because of the high costs involved and the advent of the Great Depression, the Grandeur method led to financial failure. At the time of its release only a handful of theaters in America, mainly those owned by Fox, could purchase the equipment necessary for the exhibition of Walsh's film in its most spectacular dimensions and quality.¹⁵

But even in its thirty-five-millimeter versions—those made with different casts in four different languages—The Big Trail contains scenes of natural majesty and splendor that surpass anything that had come before.¹⁶ And some of the stills or shots from the film rival the kind of breathtaking vastness of nature that had been depicted in the artworks of the Hudson River school, the first official branch of American Romantic painting. More than a few of the on-site backdrops for various shots in the movie—and especially those toward the end of the film where Breck Coleman points to the “Great White Mountain” and the lake-filled valley before him—could be mistaken for black-and-white copies of masterpieces by Cole and Bierstadt.

Above all, as epics of trail-blazing and nation-building, many of the A-Westerns had something to say about America's mission of expansionism under the banner of Manifest Destiny. In his book The Invention of the Western Film, Scott Simmon discusses The Big Trail as a clear example of this type of wilderness-conquering, frontier-settling story. He reminds us that, in the “social world” of “old Europe,” there is little or no empty farmland, and so everything is private property to someone. By contrast, Westerns deal with the idea of empty fertile land waiting to be claimed by homesteaders who must get there and work the land. It is “God's garden,” waiting to be settled and harvested. As Simmon states, “The Big Trail's purest argument for the existence of empty land on the American continent is made silently through camera angles and bodies. Pushing further the high-angle shots of The Covered Wagon (1923) and a century of landscape painting, The Big Trail is punctuated with God's-eye widescreens of wagons snaking across valleys and deserts, with shimmering mountain vistas extending to the edge of the horizon.”¹⁷

FIGURE 18. Romance in the wilderness: Breck Coleman (John Wayne) and Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill) in The Big Trail. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

According to Simmon, there are several reasons why the “wagon-train emigrants can expect to come to own the land themselves,” and these reasons have “common-law traditions behind them.”¹⁸ As the English philosopher John Locke pointed out in his Second Treatise on Government, a strong influence on the political thinking of America's founding fathers, private property results from the attachment of human labor to previously unclaimed land. The Big Trail is essentially the story of the labor that was required, not merely to cultivate a desired plot of land, but to reach it in the first place. The movie does ignore, however, the important ethical and political issue raised when one acknowledges that native peoples had once possessed many of these lands-to-be-claimed.

The trek westward is always a deadly struggle, Wayne's Breck Coleman warns his fellow travelers in The Big Trail. But it is worth it once you get there, as he describes it to them: “the bounteous natural wonders” of a land “north of Oregon.”¹⁹ Coleman is the only member of the wagon train who has been there before and who can convey the wonders and dangers lying ahead of them. Here the landscape becomes both an occasion for risk, adventure, and struggle and a source of inspiration and faith. Like the human being, the natural world should be viewed as multifaceted if it is to be properly appreciated.

Aside from giving us a genuine epic that takes full advantage of its natural landscape, and that also focuses its story of wagon train pioneers by centering on a revenge plot, The Big Trail reveals two aspects of a certain philosophy of nature. As Simmon elaborates, while most of the film shows us the oppressive (“hard”) aspects of nature that produce pain and suffering and struggle for the wagon-trainers, it also gives us a brief speech by John Wayne's character that stresses the magic and mystery of the landscape and the reasons why it entices him to spend nights alone on the moonlit desert. When asked whether he fears the risks and dangers that loom before him as he rides through the wilderness, Coleman replies (in what is, for a Wayne character, a surprisingly articulate and even poetic meditation), “Lord, no. I love it. Especially now that it's Spring, and everything's so happy. Why, there's trees out there, big tall pines, just a'reachin' and a'reachin', as if they wanted to climb right through the gates of heaven. And there's brooks too, with water smiling all day long…. Birds singing, brooks lapping, and the wind sort of crooning through the forest like some great organ.”²⁰ This “soft,” or appreciative, view of nature, as Simmon labels it, recalls the Romantic perspective expressed in Griffith's early East Coast-made Westerns before he moved his company out West and made films in which nature is oppressive and deadly (“hard”) rather than lush, nurturing, or inspirational (see chapter 1). According to Coleman's speech, nature can be serene and sublime, even while serving as a deadly obstacle and challenge to human settlers.

The scope and drama of The Big Trail echo Cruze's earlier epic The Covered Wagon (1923) and Ford's silent epic The Iron Horse (1924). But Walsh's own presentation of the wagon train theme is a vast photographic-technical improvement on those films. The Big Trail is, especially in its second half, as visually elegant and cinematically adventurous as any film made up until that time. And this is even more clearly the case when one views the seventy-millimeter widescreen version, now made accessible by Twentieth Century Fox's two-DVD special edition of the film that was released in 2008.

It is fitting that a film that puts such emphasis on the use of authentic natural landscapes and that tells the story of the rigors of pioneer life was produced in a novel widescreen process. Widescreen films are in many ways more true to the human eye's field of perception, most especially when one is pondering a landscape where the breadth and depth of one's field of vision is much greater. And in most Westerns—in which the stories are often closely tied to the land, and in which exterior scenes are crucial in providing an authentic sense of the natural terrain—the wider the screen, the more visually realistic the film appears. Western landscapes are stunning in their beauty and vastness, and the best one can do is to try to capture them realistically rather than distort them, as might happen with a more expressionistic technique of filmmaking. In Westerns there is a need for wide-eyed vision when glimpsing action across vast spaces and against distant horizons. And so the widescreen process, beginning with early innovations like The Big Trail's Grandeur method, is especially apt for Western films that attempt to convey some sense of authenticity in depicting life on the American frontier and in making the landscape itself a primary character.²¹

The commercial failure of The Big Trail gave rise to a decade likewise defined chiefly by economic failure, in which B-Westerns dominated the American movie market and appealed to a strong desire for entertainment and escapism on the part of Depression-era audiences. Between the two great John Wayne Westerns that bookended the decade—The Big Trail and Stagecoach—the iconic star found a home in the “factory” of the Hollywood B-Western and began to develop his heroic but folksy persona. Most of these popular movies mixed action and comedy in a broad manner, but more than a few also depicted the kinds of conflict that would have resonated with audience members who were struggling amid a long-running national depression. A good number of the low-budget, quickly made B-Westerns of the 1930s did not shy away from populist stories of economic survival and of clashes between decent, hardworking folk and greedy corporate land-grabbers, those who were hell-bent on taking away individuals' property or acquiring water rights.²²

John Wayne starred in many of these low-budget but socially aware Westerns. For example, in his film Two-Fisted Law (1932), in which Walter Brennan plays a deputy sheriff, “Duke” (Wayne) works for a rancher who loses his property to a crooked, cattle-rustling banker. In some of these stories, cowboy heroes sometimes unveil themselves as government-appointed lawmen or agents who help those in need for the sake of the common good, echoing the general sentiments behind Roosevelt's “New Deal” programs that attempted to rescue the American people from economic catastrophe. In The Big Stampede (1932), for example, Wayne plays a marshal appointed by the governor to bring law and order to a town in New Mexico where killers and cattle rustlers reign. In Riders of Destiny (1933), Singin' Sandy Saunders (Wayne) is an undercover government agent who helps ranchers outwit a man who both controls the local water supply and seeks to drive them out of the area unless he is paid handsomely for use of the water.

Wayne's character in Riders of Destiny, apparent from his very nickname, is one of the traditional “singing cowboys,” clean-cut heroes who put their feelings into song while riding the range and battling evil (luckily Wayne was dubbed by a genuine singer). A significant branch of the B-Western overlapped with the genre of the movie musical and featured such famous crooning stars as Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and Roy Rogers—the latter was a cofounder of the Sons of the Pioneers, a popular cowboy singing group featuring actor-singers like Shrug Fisher and Ford regular Ken Curtis.²³ Film scholar Peter Stanfield has done some highly welcome research that helps us to reevaluate the oft-overlooked 1930s B-Western, in his books Hollywood, Westerns, and the 1930s: The Lost Trail and Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy. Edward Buscombe summarizes the surge of B-Westerns in the 1930s:

During the 30s the collapse at the box office caused by the Depression had led exhibitors to seek out any gimmick to lure patrons back. Bingo, popcorn, free gifts, all were tried. An enduring legacy was the double bill, in which audiences got two pictures for the price of one. A host of minor studios rushed to cash in on the opportunity this provided, supplying product for the lower, or “B,” half of the programme. Thus was born the B-Western, the dusty vineyard in which John Wayne laboured throughout his early manhood. Wayne's career showed that it was possible to make the leap up from the lower depths into the sunlit pastures of stardom, but for the most part the two worlds kept themselves apart, two parallel industries supplying product for two polarized markets.²⁴

Despite the typical major differences between these two categories of Western, especially in terms of cinematic quality, there are occasional instances of overlap or transition between the B-Westerns of the 1930s and those A-Westerns that began to emerge at the tail end of the decade. Films like James Cruze's Sutter's Gold (1936), Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), King Vidor's The Texas Rangers (1936), and Frank Lloyd's Wells Fargo (1937) helped to establish a serious effort by the big studios to rise above the generally lower artistic levels of their B-Western productions. But these movies also failed to reach the levels of cinematic artistry attained by the classic A-Westerns that were soon to come. The latter helped to constitute a “partial A-Western renaissance,” a category coined by George N. Fenin and William K. Everson in their landmark survey of the cinematic genre, The Western: From Silents to the Seventies.²⁵

It was with Ford's Stagecoach, however, that the realism captured by Walsh in The Big Trail became fused with visual poetry as well as with archetypal character portraits, playing upon the genre's underlying dialectic between gritty authenticity and mythic grandeur. The landscapes in Stagecoach are as majestic as those in The Big Trail, but Ford gives us characters who are far worthier objects of our attention and intrigue than are the stilted caricatures in Walsh's earlier film. Stagecoach presents Western folk whose gestures and intonations are as nuanced and symbolic as the natural world around them. With Ford's greatest Western yet, we begin to see signs that the Hollywood Westerns of the Depression era were mere stepping-stones to the standard-setting classics to come.

STAGECOACH

Lillian Gish had correctly guessed that Dorothy Scarborough's The Wind would make a wonderful movie because it was “pure motion,” suggested by the very title of the novel and by the subsequent script based on it (see chapter 2).²⁶ John Ford must have had a similar intuition when he planned for the production of Stagecoach. The Western film tends to be, in a manner of speaking, more “cinematic” than the more theatrical and dialogue-laden genres. This is because film is chiefly defined as an art of the moving image, and the Western typically involves such essential action-and-motion-oriented elements as rapid horse riding, last-minute escapes from enemy threats, suspenseful chases, and determined desert crossings. While it is true that all film images “move,” technically speaking, Western movies frequently highlight imagery that affords the viewer a dramatic sense of being transported across great spaces and distances, a feeling of immediacy not provided by other art forms such as painting, theater, and literature. By its very title and basic plot, Stagecoach lets the audience know that it will be “on the move” for much of its duration.

Stagecoach was Ford's first Western of the sound era and marked his return to the Western genre for the first time since 3 Bad Men of 1926. A twelve-year gap ensued before he went to Monument Valley in the autumn of 1938, and few Ford films of the intervening years used landscape to meaningful effect.²⁷ More important, Stagecoach was the first of many Westerns Ford shot in Monument Valley and the first Ford film with John Wayne as its star.²⁸ With Stagecoach, Ford helped to transform the genre and to shift the Western from its 1930s status as “B” picture to the “A” category, paving the way for his own and other Hollywood directors' masterful Westerns of the next three decades. While Walsh's The Big Trail was really the first sound Western to give its audiences a genuine sense of the breathtaking vistas that were regularly witnessed by the settlers of the Old West, it was Ford's Stagecoach that incorporated the landscape into a character-driven Western of truly classic proportions and quality. Not since The Big Trail had a director selected sites for on-location shooting with as self-conscious an intention, though Ford had always been attuned to the importance of place and terrain.

Ford had shot most of his early Westerns for Universal in California's river-and-ranch country and the Mojave Desert. These films included the Cheyenne Harry films Straight Shooting (1917), Marked Men (1919), and The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919). Ford's first film for William Fox, Just Pals (1920), was set on the Wyoming-Nebraska border. His two feature Westerns of the 1920s, The Iron Horse and 3 Bad Men, were set in the central West but not actually filmed in that region. For The Iron Horse, the territory of the transcontinental railroad; the settlements of the North Platte and Cheyenne, Wyoming; and the hidden pass not far from Smoky River were shot in the Sierra Nevada. For 3 Bad Men Ford consciously chose the mountainous panorama of the Grand Tetons to provide a strong horizontal backdrop to the more static drama of the fortune hunters at camp and in the territorial town of Custer. And he needed the vast flatness of the California desert to set off the huge sweep of wagons and horsemen in the land rush depicted in the latter film (see chapter 1).

Ford's evocation of an authentic landscape, so beautifully realized in the mountains and desert of 3 Bad Men, became poetic in Stagecoach. Ford chose to film neither in the familiar California country of his early Westerns nor in Wyoming, but in the landscape of the Southwest. He selected Monument Valley to represent a country of settlements and Indian tribes of the 1880s, an enclosed but seemingly vast desert landscape that is part of the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, crossing from Arizona into Utah.²⁹

Monument Valley provides a seemingly eternal canvas against which the variables and vagaries of human existence can be etched. Many a classic Western film depends on its capacity to create the illusion of spatial and temporal passage, a passage that is emblematic of the wider notion of the transience of human life.

Monument Valley so impressed Ford that he would shoot Stagecoach and part or all of six later films in the valley's locations: My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge, and Cheyenne Autumn.³⁰ Whether shooting in black and white or in color, Ford captured panoramic vistas of earth and sky that stretch more than thirty miles, a singular universe that suited his notion of a deep but contained space, at once trapping and freeing the characters of his stories. As Ford related in an interview done in 1964: “I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land…. My favorite location is 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.”³¹

Stagecoach relates a desperate two-day journey in an area along the Arizona and New Mexico border with Mexico—from Tonto to Lordsburg through Dry Forks and Apache Wells—as the coach races to elude Geronimo and his Chiricahua Apaches. Ford read Ernest Haycox's story “The Stage to Lordsburg” in Collier's magazine in 1937 and bought the movie rights. Dudley Nichols wrote the screenplay, changing names and adapting characters, and Ford added his own touches to the story and dialogue. Ford had almost always collaborated actively with his screenwriters, and Nichols was particularly open to Ford's suggestions. There were exceptions, of course, where this type of collaboration did not occur: Ford's filming of screenplays by Nunnally Johnson (The Prisoner of Shark Island, The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road) and by Philip Dunne (How Green Was My Valley).³² Nichols, who veered toward the theatrical and literary and therefore provided a good balance with the visually oriented Ford, had already worked with the director on pre-Stagecoach productions such as The Lost Patrol (1934), Judge Priest (1934), The Informer (1935), Steamboat around the Bend (1935), Mary of Scotland (1936), The Plough and the Stars (1936), and The Hurricane (1937). After Stagecoach, he wrote the screenplay for Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940), based on several one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill, and concluded his career with Ford by writing the script for the highly symbolic and commercially unsuccessful The Fugitive (1947).

Stagecoach's musical score and the passage of coach and riders through the landscape are inseparable; their complementary rhythms form the beat of the movie. Adapted from American folk tunes of the early 1880s such as “I Dream of Jeanie,” the musical themes are simple and familiar, striking up each time the coach starts to pull its weighty load as if encouraging the teams of horses in the race to safety. Musical motifs also alert us to the terrors of Geronimo and his war party. Music, and especially music derived from the traditional American folk songbook, has always played an important role in Ford's films (his Western Rio Grande even borders on being a musical in certain scenes), and the director allegedly immersed himself in period music when undertaking the research for many of his movies.³³ In Stagecoach, music provides an almost subconscious connection with America's past while also affording an upbeat accompaniment to the journey of the stagecoach passengers. As Kathryn Kalinak tells us in her enlightening book How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford:

Film music's power to return us to a general idealized past is transformed through folk and period song into a specific idealized past, the nineteenth-century American West, a mythic past that never actually existed. Bruno David Ussher, in his 1939 review of the film, recognized this power, noting that the American music makes Stagecoach “more of a correspondingly true portrayal of life as it was on the middle-border half a century ago.” Folk and period songs not only make the imagined past real, however, they create nostalgia for it, harnessing the pleasures and plentitudes of film music, its ability to offer a utopic alternative to experiential reality (more integrated, harmonic, and aesthetically pleasing), to Ford's particular vision of a moment in America's past.³⁴

The pleasurable excitement and the rollicking mood of Stagecoach are established with the opening credits sequence. Credits appear over shots of the army troop riding through Monument Valley, followed by Indians on horseback, all moving from left to right and accompanied by gay music, then by a shot of the stagecoach traveling through the valley, a shot which carries the final credit “Directed by John Ford.” We cut to riders coming into camp to tell of hills filled with Apaches, stirred up by Geronimo, who has jumped the reservation and gone on the warpath. Placed at a low vantage point, the camera shoots up at the valley's famous features, its high and deeply carved buttes—its monuments—rising from the valley floor. Above two of these, the Mittens, move high, puffy white clouds, creating strong shadows. The impact of the rock buttes seen against a low horizon and big sky is startling and staggering, richly expressive of mood and effect, a mise-en-scène in black and white of such contrast and beauty that we are thrilled.

With Stagecoach, Ford revealed his visionary talent for rendering landscape in ways quite different from the expansionist themes of The Iron Horse and 3 Bad Men. Each of these latter films depicts large groups of people engaged in activities that take them over plains and the mountainous terrain of the vast West. These people have a specific purpose, and they are building the new nation. The horizontality of the background with the looming Tetons in the first half of 3 Bad Men emphasizes the tense waiting among newly arrived wagons before the land rush. These people are going somewhere, in a hurry, but not for some time, and Ford establishes character and motive on a broad and static set.

The theme of Stagecoach, however, is tied to quite another theme in conjunction with quite another expansionist goal: class conflicts within white society, as well as the removal of the Indians by the United States Army. The story is not about building communities, for they already exist in Tonto and in Lordsburg. It is about keeping control of these communities and defending them against external threats while also overcoming social conflicts, such as those resulting from class-based prejudice, that are internal to these societies.³⁵ As the drunken physician Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) declares to the prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor) as they are being exiled from Tonto for their “degenerate” lifestyles, they are “the victims of a foul disease called ‘social prejudice.’”

The protagonists do not aim to settle the Southwest; they go forth in uneasy relation to the land and they try desperately to survive in areas where they clearly are not wanted. Several of the passengers—Ringo, Dallas, and Doc—also go forth in uneasy relation to society itself, given their outcast status and their treatment by others. The landscape does not welcome the transients; it threatens them. Its rocks and hills hide hostile Apaches bent on killing them. The travelers are trapped, and much of the story is a sequence of chase and escape before they reach the dubious safety of the raucous and not particularly law-abiding Lordsburg. Kalinak, in fact, shows us how the different parts of the film's musical score clue us in (subconsciously, at least) to the conflict between the whites and their Indian enemies: “The Anglo passengers are represented by what is perceived by most listeners as folk song. Because of the immense cultural investment in folk music as a distinctly American art form, especially in the 1930s, its use confers Americanness on whom it accompanies: the Anglo passengers inside the coach, the towns they emerge from and move to, and even the wilderness itself.”³⁶

Ford is interested in the passage of individuals through space and time, and he wastes little energy on the towns of Tonto and Lordsburg, concentrating instead on the cinematography of the supposedly treacherous landscape. Within the sharp-edged frame, Ford creates an impression of limitless depth and height. This merging of subject and setting, rather than a view of the landscape as merely a backdrop, characterizes the Western genre at its best and is integral to Ford's vision and narrative. In Stagecoach Ford joins character, action, and setting in a seamless, cliché-filled narrative, cutting between scenes that are melodramatic yet broadly comic and shots of the stagecoach being frantically pulled along below the valley's buttes.

If Stagecoach joins Destry Rides Again (released the same year) as one of the two wittiest Westerns to date, this is in part because of the contradictions it sets before us with such delight. The towns, supposedly civilized communities, are full of the white people's chicanery, thievery, hypocrisy, and murderous intent, while the landscape—vast, beautiful, and unspoiled—is nonetheless home to the terrors of the fiercest of Indians: Geronimo. At the end of Ford's Stagecoach, Ringo and Dallas ride off to Ringo's ranch just across the border, “free from the blessings of civilization”—as Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) laughingly tells Sheriff Curley (George Bancroft) in the movie's final line. Their flight into Mexico will, we can hope, bring newfound freedom and opportunity (the reverse of today's current border situation, in which the arrow of hope tends to point north rather than south). Ringo and Dallas, while apparently fleeing “civilization,” are the kind of good-hearted romantic pair who might nonetheless help to initiate a more benevolent form of society in the Old West, one that has overcome the kind of pettiness and prejudice that they had experienced in Tonto and along their journey to Lordsburg.³⁷

Ford's depiction of the birth of Lucy Mallory's baby, the emotional center point and central transformative event of the film, includes shots of Ringo and Dallas staring at each other lovingly over the newly delivered child which has been nicknamed “Little Coyote”—a child born in the wilderness but to a woman who represents an aristocratic southern culture. The scene of a baby's birth amid a savage wilderness (one might also think here of a similar plot element in Ford's later 3 Godfathers of 1948, as well as in his final feature film of 1965, 7 Women) gives us the clear sense that the escape across the border to Ringo's ranch at the end of the film will result in new life and the creation of a family, the basic building block of any stable civilization. Ringo's ranch, never seen, is the offscreen symbol of a pastoral, settled existence, one in which the need for gunslinging and revenge has been overcome.³⁸ Like Gary Cooper's Cole Harden in Wyler's The Westerner, released a year after Stagecoach, Ringo has been a lone drifter and gunslinger who tires of his solitude and desires to build a home, most especially after having found the woman of his dreams (see chapter 5). Ringo and Cole are therefore atypical westerners, since such figures usually remain solitary and independent.

With all of the essential and traditional elements of the genre in place, Stagecoach garnered upon its release a general critical response that was as enthusiastic as its box office reception, an appraisal that has only grown over the years. Frank S. Nugent, a film critic-turned-screenwriter who later collaborated with Ford on many a script (from Fort Apache and The Searchers to Donovan's Reef), wrote about the film in the March 3, 1939, issue of the New York Times:

John Ford has swept aside ten years of artifice and talkie compromise and has made a motion picture that sings a song of camera. It moves, and how beautifully it moves, across the plains of Arizona, skirting the sky-reaching mesas of Monument Valley, beneath the piled-up cloud banks which every photographer dreams about…. Mr. Ford is not one of your subtle directors, suspending sequences on the wink of an eye or the precisely calculated gleam of a candle in a mirror. He prefers the broadest canvas, the brightest colors, the widest brush and the boldest possible strokes. He hews to the straight narrative line with the well-reasoned confidence of a man who has seen that narrative succeed before. He takes no shadings from his characters; either they play it straight or they don't play at all. He likes his language simple and he doesn't want too much of it. When his Redskins bite the dust, he expects to hear the thud and see the dirt spurt up. Above all, he likes to have things happen in the open, where his camera can keep them in view…. This is one stagecoach that's powered by a Ford.³⁹

Film scholar and theoretician André Bazin describes the film's artistry in similarly effusive terms: “In seeing again today such films as Jezebel by William Wyler, Stagecoach by John Ford, or Le Jour se lève by Marcel Carné, one has the feeling that in them an art has found its perfect balance, its ideal form of expression…. In short, here are all the characteristics of the ripeness of a classical art.”⁴⁰ As Bazin further says about this masterwork's merit as a model that sets the standard against which other movies should be judged, “Stagecoach (1939) is the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classical perfection…. Stagecoach is like a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position.”⁴¹ No wonder, then, that Orson Welles studied Ford's movie rigorously in preparing to make the movie that has been rated by many film scholars as one of the greatest ever made: Citizen Kane (1941). Welles admitted once in an interview: “John Ford was my teacher. My own style has nothing to do with his, but Stagecoach was my movie textbook. I ran it over forty times…. I wanted to learn how to make movies, and that's such a classically perfect one.”⁴²

The “classical” qualities of Stagecoach would be echoed and amplified by many other A-Westerns of the World War II period, especially those made between 1939 and 1942—just before the war film began to replace the Western as the dominant genre during the height of America's involvement in the global conflict. Two highly different masterworks of this period—Northwest Passage and The Westerner (both 1940)—are discussed in the next chapter. After 1945, as we shall see, the Western film began a gradual transition from classical to postclassical, a transformation brought about by filmmakers who sought to transcend the traditional parameters of the genre, particularly given the psychological and existential climate of the postwar world.