This is the fictional story of nine strangers, picked to ride in a stagecoach, work together and have their lives filmed. To find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.
The Real World: Apache Nation.
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| Stay with me here… |
Though it lacks the wall-breaking confessionals and the of-the-moment pop flavor of MTV’s long running reality show, John Ford’s Stagecoach brought to mind The Real World’s introduction slash statement of purpose the instant all of its characters were assembled and racing through dangerous Indian territory. Here we have a group of people with one immediate common interest—to get to Lordsburg in one piece—though their own individual motivations force them to form alliances or butt heads with their fellow travelers.
We even get the runaway star that will thrive in a post-show world because of his standout charm—John Wayne.
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| Wherein America begins its long bromance with John Wayne |
And like any juicy, close-quarters reality show, it’s not the vague premise of a bunch of zeitgeisty people just sharing the same livings space that makes things interesting, but rather how their personalities clash, mesh and eventually change over the course of the season. Or in this case, one harrowing wagon ride.
Here the nutshell version of the story is that nine people, for various reasons, need to get out of town.
Among the first we met are Dallas, our story’s whore with a heart of gold and Doc Boone, the town’s not so lovable drunk. Both aren’t so much leaving as they are being forced out by the snobs of the self described Law and Order League, a coalition of holier than though woman whose organization has deceivingly little to do with keeping tabs on Detectives Stabler and Benson.
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| Not affiliated with the Law & Order League |
Boone’s a drunk, but he’s incredibly charming and at points heroic in his own way, likewise Dallas only ever seems to be genuinely caring towards the very pregnant Lucy Mallory, so who cares if she does her forty hours a week on her back? At least it’s honest work for her, unlike the corrupt banker Gatewood who is trying to make it out of town with $50,000 in stolen cash but is still, no doubt, considered to be an upstanding citizen by the Law and Order League.
As Boone so eloquently puts it before dramatically walking away from the town’s gaggle of prudes, arm-in-arm with Dallas, they are both “the victims of a foul disease called social prejudice.” This tends to be the case with several of the travelers in Stagecoach, and Westerns in general, where moral ambiguity is par for the course and despite a character’s profession or actions, what the audience ultimately sides with is their motivation and intentions.
No one is a better example of this in the film than breakout star John Wayne as the Ringo Kid, a known gunslinger on a crusade to avenge the death of his father and brother. From the get-go, Ringo is determined to hunt down and kill the Plummers. Its such widely known common knowledge that Marshall Wilcox is only tagging along on because he knows that if the Plummers are in Lordsburg than Ringo will be there. Before we meet him, Ringo is established as a renegade outlaw who needs to be brought in, but when we—and a 1939 audience who may not know one John Wayne from his low-budget serials and minor roles—meet him for the first time, we aren’t given some dirty, mean-eyed bandit, we’re the swaggering, charismatic Duke.
In the bonus features on the Criterion edition of Stagecoach, film historian and director Peter Bogdanovich refers to Wayne as a “C to Z movie actor” and in a separate interview, director John Ford jokingly(?) describes John Wayne pre-Stagecoach as his “third assistant prop man.” That zoom in on Wayne, smoking Winchester in hand and the iconic Monument Valley landscape behind him firmly established that he would go on to represent what it meant to be a man’s man on-screen for the next several decades.
The stars, it seemed, were aligned for Stagecoach.
It was John Ford’s first crack at a talkie Western.
It was John Wayne’s first major role and first time working with Ford. Likewise, it marks the film debut of Monument Valley, whose unmistakable columns of rock are just as closely associated with Western mythology as the Johns Ford and Wayne.
So we have the vision laid out by Ford, a motley crew stuck together in close quarters. We have the memorable location, in this case Monument Valley. And we have the cast member who steals the show, a young, ready to take on the world John Wayne.
In sticking with the blasphemous Real World analogy here, Stagecoach gives us what something like a Real World-type reality show gives its audiences; a chance for outsiders to observe the broad stereotypes that inhabit a particular on-screen world, be they the citizens of America’s romanticized Wild West or the twentysomethings of America’s romanticized, big city life.
And of course, what makes Stagecoach so great is how it sidesteps around just as many norms as it embraces. Naturally I know that John Wayne gets to ride off with the girl at the end because he’s John Wayne, but how Ringo gets to the end was no less surprising to watch. As for any expectations about a film made in the Thirties, a Western no less, I was pleasantly surprised.
Ford used a lot of low angles and shadows to build a much more dramatic mood than that of the pulpy, popcorn movies that I had been anticipating. The climactic chase sequence with the Apaches even avoided the Three Stooges-esque sped up frame rate to give the illusion of intense action.
Instead it was a balls out display of derring-do, full of amazing stunts and some truly nail biting moments.
Even the shoot-out with the bad guys at high noon was scrapped for a quick and dirty showdown in the dead of night that happens so quick it’s over before it starts.
I chose Stagecoach to start this little trip into the West because of all of the firsts it marked and I couldn’t have been happier with how it turned out. While it would be naïve of me to expect every movie I watch to live up to the same standard, I walk away from Real World: Apache Nation humbled and more than a bit embarrassed about how superficial I have been all these years when it comes to Westerns.
I learned a lesson about respect, man, and about not being so quick to label people.
And that whether they’re in color or black and white, all movies should be viewed equally, you know?
I guess you could say that this is my end of episode confession and thus, the analogy has been played to it’s logical conclusion.
