Hollywood's Greatest Year 1

Who knows if 1939 really was Hollywood's greatest year, but as suggested in this post, many count it as such. Among my favorite movies released that year is John Ford's classic western Stagecoach, which pretty much made a star of John Wayne. To me, a large part of what makes Stagecoach great has little to do with the conventions of western movies (also true of that other 1939 classic, Destry Rides Again), though they are abundant in the film: the outlaw on the run, the Indian attack, the climactic shootout. What makes this film really good is the way that Ford handles the construction of community among the passengers on the coach. It's a wonderful microcosm of a common western theme, but pushed into the forefront of the story and personalized in a way that rarely occurs in more pedestrian fare of the genre. What becomes evident if you watch a lot of westerns is just how little we ever learn about those who aren't toting a gun or otherwise attracting trouble. While a big part of the mythology of the west claims to celebrate the "average" folk who settled the land, they're often consigned to the background of movies where they provide little more than a quick reference point or motivation for the hero's actions, or portrayed as distinctly un-heroic themselves and therefore dependent on the hero for salvation. Not so in Stagecoach. The various travelers almost all (the exception being the blowhard banker) rise to unexpected heights of moral or physical courage motivated not just by self-preservation, but also their bond to one another. As a consequence, the best scenes in the film-- those with some real emotional punch-- are not those laden with action, but rather the ones where the individual members of the ensemble (like Doc Boone, played by the great Thomas Mitchell, staring down the bad guys) reveal their true character by ignoring selfish impulses in order to look out for someone else. Watch John Wayne's Ringo Kid as he walks Dallas (Claire Trevor) through the red light district of Lordsburg, registering the slow realization of who she is and the resolve that none of that matters after what they had gone through together-- it's great stuff, and not exactly the kind of subtlety normally associated with the Duke. John Ford began his career as a western director and pretty much ended up doing mostly westerns too, but Stagecoach came at a time when he was much more eclectic in choosing his topics (his next movie was another highlight of 1939, Young Mr. Lincoln; it would be seven years befoire he returned to a western topic with My Darling Clementine). I suspect that partly explains why this plays more like a character study than a genre exercise, though there's no doubt that Ford knew how to deliver the goods for those who turned out to see the cowboy hats and gunplay too. This is one definitely of those classics that grows richer with each viewing.