by Marc Eliot
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.”
In his aptly titled The John Ford Mystery, Sarris notes that “Stagecoach was more the beginning than the summing up of a tradition, and when we think of the Seventh Cavalry riding to the rescue of white womanhood, we are thinking no further back than Stagecoach . . . today [1975] it is surprising how much of Stagecoach is conventionally theatrical (Kane ceilings and all) and expressionistically shadowy . . . the point is that Stagecoach has been clarified and validated by what has followed. 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 subsequent career . . . thus from a certain point of view, Stagecoach is a triumph of classic editing in the Thirties manner, and nothing more . . . It is the economy of expression that makes Ford one of the foremost poets of the screen. It can be argued that Stagecoach, even before Kane, anticipates the modern cinema’s emphasis on personal style as an end to itself. And it can be argued also that, through Ford’s style is less visible than Welles’ it is eminently more visual, as Welles himself would generally admit.”
According to Peter Bogdanovich, Welles watched Stagecoach forty times while preparing to make Citizen Kane, because of Ford’s deceptively simply evocation of a blending of several stories, his cinematography, and the movement of his camera. And Bogdanovich offers this tantalizing revelation of an anecdote, from Wayne himself, about his acting in the film: “When Ford asked him what he thought of his own performance, Wayne just shrugged and said (repeating it to me), ‘Oh, well, I’m just playing you—you know what that is.’ ” Bogdanovich continues, “When a movie actor says something of that kind, he means that in the picture he is essentially doing what the director has asked for, told or shown him.”
Indeed, Ford keeps the actor’s laconic character in the forefront throughout by repeatedly cutting to his silent reactions. From Wayne’s entrance, Ford is consciously creating a star. The success of Stagecoach changed everything for Wayne. “I had never in my life seen anything as exciting . . . the way those [audiences] took to the picture was tremendous. They laughed, clapped, stomped and obviously loved it.” He sometimes joked about his good fortune with typical self-deprecation: “When I first got into this business . . . for several years I rode or stumbled, narrow-beamed and flat-bellied, across most of the mountains and deserts of Denver. I was known in those days as a good, grim, rangy type who needed the money and I seldom lacked work . . . Oh I got a couple of fine breaks. Then, when I made Stagecoach, I was a 48-hour wonder.”
THE ACADEMY AWARDS FOR THE films of 1939 were presented on February 29, 1940, at the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, with the
witty Bob Hope presiding over the after-dinner ceremonies. The ten nominations for Best Picture included Edmund Goulding’s vehicle for Bette Davis, Dark Victory—she was also nominated for her performance in it; Victor Fleming’s ode to the burning of Atlanta, Gone with the Wind; Hollywood’s opaque acknowledgment of the European march of fascism, Sam Wood’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Leo McCarey’s celebration of one-night stands, Love Affair; Frank Capra’s complex pro-American/antigovernment David and Goliath tale, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, set in Congress, starring James Stewart as David and Senator Claude Rains as Goliath; Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, Hollywood’s attempt to humanize America’s about-to-be-Allies, the Russians; Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men; Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz; William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights; and in that elite circle of films, John Ford’s complex, majestic, and immensely entertaining Stagecoach.
Hope called the night “[a] wonderful thing, this benefit for Selznick.” The joke was both funny and to the point. Before the ceremonies ended, Gone with the Wind had won ten Oscars, a record that would last for twenty years. Thomas Mitchell, who that year also gave a superb presentation as Scarlett O’Hara’s father in Gone with the Wind, walked away with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his nuanced performance as Doc in Stagecoach. “I didn’t think I was that good,” he said as he accepted his award. “I don’t have a speech, I’m too incoherent!”
John Ford lost Best Director to Fleming (Gone with the Wind), but John Wayne, whose performance was perhaps the best by any actor that year, was not even nominated.59 It didn’t appear to matter to Wayne. As he later said, Stagecoach was nothing short of a rebirth for him as an actor: “At an age when most leading men are starting down the wrong side of the hill, I became a star.”
WITH STAGECOACH, HIS EIGHTY-SECOND FILM, John Wayne became Hollywood’s newest overnight leading man, tougher than Jimmy Stewart, rougher than Clark Gable, more stoic than Henry Fonda. He had pulled off an amazing and nearly impossible feat, coming all the way back from the failure of The Big Trail, and the decade-long exile from big pictures, to join the A-list of Hollywood stars. Everybody loved him now, inside the industry and in movie theaters all over the world.
Everybody but Josephine, who had to live with Wayne, not just see him in his glory on the big screen, which is where, she finally began to admit, he really lived. She could no longer stand his carousing, his drinking, his lack of homebound responsibilities, and his apparent love of horses over her. If wanted it so much, he could have his own life back.
That was why, on what should have been the best night of his life, and despite her religious convictions that did not permit such a thing, she decided she was going to divorce her husband.
Chapter 7
Josephine’s world was one of order, propriety, and self-control, wrapped up neatly with her furniture, her family, and her church. As a Catholic, marriage was sacred, supposed to bring couples together, not push them apart. She talked to her husband about her feelings soon after the success of Stagecoach, that it was obvious to her he was no longer willing to play the one role she cared most about, the loving husband. Wayne knew she was right and, for his own reasons, wouldn’t be able tolerate a loveless marriage the way his father had.
Instead, he found the comfort and emotional salve he needed not just from the public’s adoration for his on-screen heroics, but in real life in the arms of Claire Trevor, his costar in Stagecoach, whose affair with him paralleled both in time and intensity their on-screen romance. Wayne struggled with his guilt about it and shared his feelings about it with Ford, who had gone through his own extramarital affair with Katharine Hepburn, and it brought the two men closer together. Wayne and Ford took long sailing trips, just the two of them, with few words spoken. Few needed to be.
When Josephine said she wanted a divorce, Wayne tried, in his guilt-fueled way, to assure her they could still make their marriage work. And they did, for a while, even though Wayne no longer made any excuses for not attending Josie’s nightly clerical socials and teas, rarely slept at home, and never in the same bed. He preferred the small place he kept just off the Republic lot to use as a place of refuge, when he wasn’t sailing with Ford or sleeping there with Trevor.
FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS OF STAGECOACH, Yates decided to exercise the option he held on the star for westerns, and take advantage of his newfound fame by using him in a few more fifty-minute quickies. Wayne had been through this roller-coaster ride before, after The Big Trail, but this time, things were different. Stagecoach was everything The Big Trail wasn’t, and he intended to see to it that it wasn’t a one-shot wonder that would lead him straight back to the mediocrity of the Republic Bs. He began by changing agents, or, more accurately, his agent changed from him, a move that would prove most auspicious for Wayne. Leo Morrison, as owner of the Morrison Agency, was still, technically speaking, Wayne’s agent, not Kingston. But nearly broke, he sold Wayne’s contract for cash (Wayne saw none of it) to Charles K. Feldman, a former Los Angeles–based lawyer who had given up his practice to found his own talent agency, Famous Artists Corporation, which had quickly became one of the most powerful in Hollywood. Feldman’s roster of clients included Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Fred MacMurray, and George Raft, all heavyweights in the studios’ rosters of the late ’30s and early ’40s. Feldman had what one friend called the soul of a gambler. Another described him as having the biggest brass balls in Hollywood. He did things no one else would dare, like marrying Louis B. Mayer’s girlfriend, which resulted in Mayer vowing never to use any of Feldman’s clients. (The vow didn’t hold. In Hollywood there is only one thing more important than loyalty—and that is money). Feldman was the first agent in Hollywood to put together “package deals.” Up until the day he died in 1968 at the relatively young age of sixty-three, he lived it up, with homes in Beverly Hills, the French Riviera, New York, London, and Paris. Despite all the accoutrements of fame, making deals for his clients and making his clients stars (or bigger stars), he was eager to do the same for Wayne, believing bigger things were possible for the actor who was still, essentially, considered a cowboy rather than an actor by the Hollywood studios.
One of the first things Feldman did for Wayne was to meet with Herbert Yates, to have him officially acknowledge the obvious, that Wayne was no longer a B actor.
Yates offered a compromise that Feldman thought he and Wayne could live with. If Wayne finished out his still active contract at the same salary he was making before Stagecoach, Yates would give up all future options he still held on the actor for westerns. The deal was about to make Wayne a very wealthy man.
In the three years following Stagecoach, Feldman arranged for Wayne to star in eleven films, only four of which were Republic westerns, none with the impact of his breakthrough performance as the Ringo Kid. Wayne also finished his original obligation to make the last eight episodes of the fifty-one The Three Mesquiteers films based on three cowboy buddies invented by the novelist William Colt MacDonald. He had made several before Stagecoach, all directed by George Sherman.60
The first film Feldman got for Wayne away from Republic was at RKO, which Yates insisted the studio pay $10,000 to borrow Wayne for. Allegheny Uprising was a prerevolutionary drama in which Wayne played a Daniel Boone–type frontiersman. It was made in late 1939, directed by William Seiter and costarring Claire Trevor (who, at Wayne’s behind-the-scenes urging, replaced Irene Dunne at the last minute; Trevor again received top billing over Wayne, and $22,500 for her work in the film, to Wayne’s $6,000). This re-pairing of the stars of Stagecoach also reprised their off-screen romance, and their relationship in Allegheny Uprising is the best thing in this otherwise unmemorable film. (Its only other importance is that it kick-started the career of George Saunders out of his stock character of the suave, if morally flawed Brit in B movies into his stock character of the suave, if morally flawed Brit in A movies.) Otherwise, Allegheny Uprising, which Feldman intended as the follow-up hit to Stagecoach that would
confirm Wayne’s hold on stardom, failed, winding up with a loss of $245,000 from a budget of nearly a million dollars, a huge financial blow for RKO.
Wayne, via Feldman, then returned to Republic to star in The Dark Command, to be directed by Raoul Walsh, who had been at the helm of The Big Trail and had since landed at Warner’s. Walsh’s career, like Wayne’s, had gone nowhere after the failure of The Big Trail. He had made a series of action-oriented features that did nothing until 1939, when producer Hal Wallis hired Walsh to do what would become one of the classics of Warner’s crime cycle, The Roaring Twenties, notable for pairing two of Warner’s biggest “criminals,” James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. The film elevated the careers of Cagney, Bogart, and Priscilla Lane, the female lead. Walsh then went to Republic to work with one of the biggest cowboy acts not just at Republic but in all of Hollywood—Roy Rogers, in The Dark Command, which also starred John Wayne, Trevor, and “Gabby” Hayes.61 Republic had hired Walsh to direct their new singing cowboy sensation Roy Rogers, along with John Wayne.
The Dark Command, released in 1940 and loosely based on Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War, is a story of betrayal and rescue, and contains a surprisingly rousing performance by John Wayne. The reviews for the film confirmed this, making it clear that Wayne was an actor with staying power to be reckoned with. Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times, declared, “The most pleasant surprise of the picture is the solid performance of John Wayne as the Marshal . . . Mr. Wayne knows the type; and given a character to build, he does it with vigor, cool confidence and a casual wit.” William Everson, in his A Pictorial History of the Western Film, said this about Wayne’s performance: “Probably the most important commercial element in [The Dark Command] is the emergence of John Wayne as an actor of sureness and character. Mr. Wayne, like Gary Cooper before him, has been known through many films as a good-looking man who could ride horseback . . . John Wayne has become more than an action star for little-boy audiences on Saturday afternoons.” It is big praise and well deserved. After he had had to temporarily return to B pictures, Wayne’s performance for Walsh in The Dark Command relit his A-status starlight.