On DVD: How Does Stagecoach Stack Up Against Its Myth?

Few American movies have been as relentlessly canonized as John Ford's Stagecoach -- the '65 Ford Mustang of Golden Era genre films. It's an institution by now, from AFI tabulations to various best-ever lists (Luchino Visconti!) to National Film Registry entry to Oscar nominations (and one win, for Thomas Mitchell, who appeared in four other films in 1939, including Gone with the Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) to timeworn adulation as a piece of timeless western iconography to Orson Welles claiming, in prep for Citizen Kane, to have screened Ford's movie 40 times. You have to see it, you have to own it.

You've also got to wonder, as Criterion releases a picture-perfect edition (the third U.S. DVD release), typically loaded with scholarly extras, if it's all that and a side of beans. Let's face it, time has not been too kind, from my perspective, to the auteurist-driven view of the supposedly "greatest year," 1939. Gone with the Wind smells today like a eulogy for slavery; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is sanctimonious and naive; Goodbye, Mr. Chips is shruggingly dull; The Wizard of Oz is... well, The Wizard of Oz, such an odd, over-broadcast, brown-Woodstock-LSD headtrip that it seems to resist reevaluation. And so on. (Wyler's Wuthering Heights, generally derided as a compromised yawn, can still take me down at the knees, while Lubitsch's Ninotchka seemed perfect when it came out and still does.)

Stagecoach is troublesome, like many John Ford movies, which happily indulge in cliches about evil Native Americans and military honor and cute Irish alcoholism and female inferiority that can dampen your enthusiasm for the Monument Valley landscapes (seen in this movie for the first time in a western). It's true that Ford, long and popular as his career was, hit a few lovely boomers out of the park; The Searchers (1956) may still be the greatest western, and in 1940-41 Ford had a run of odes that still leave tender bruises: The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Long Voyage Home (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941).

Stagecoach is about as inventive and entertaining a western as anyone had made up to 1939. But it's no masterwork, even if you manage to disregard Ford social attitudes. The film's structural simplicity (a motley assortment of characters, including Mitchell's drunk doctor, John Wayne's roguish outlaw and Claire Trevor's humiliated tramp, are stuck in the titular coach together during Geronimo's warpath) is still compelling, but it's also predictable. Predictable because Ford at his weakest always made his characters do we wanted them to do, satisfying us in cheap fast-food kind of way, and because the set-up (supposedly borrowed from a Guy de Maupassant story) has been copied, ripped off and reused so many times since.

In 1939, the film was not high-profile (Wayne was not yet a star, but would be afterwards), and westerns themselves were not A-list projects (early sound recording required stories to be more backlot-bound). But Ford's natural storytelling zest and knack for slightly irregular character collisions made the film a hit, and westerns were hot again. Maybe the most and least you can say for Stagecoach is that the 12-year-old matinee-goer of '39, Gene Autry fan that he was, must've had his little world rocked.