Stagecoach, The Western Redefined For Ever

(left)George Bancroft, John Wayne and Claire Trevor
John Ford hadn't made a western for a dozen years when he cast John Wayne and Claire Trevor in a story about a stagecoach ride through dangerous Indian territory. The film does not stint on the genre's traditional satisfactions and the last part of the film packs in plenty of action, including a gunfight between Wayne and the Plummer gang and a stirring Indian attack as the stagecoach careers across the flat desert. The sequence was enriched by some superlative stuntwork by Yakima Canutt, who, playing one of the Apache attackers, leaps onto one of the stage's horses, is then shot, and has to fall between the horses' hooves and under the wheels.

This was Wayne's second chance at major stardom after the failure of 'The Big Trail', and he took it with both hands. From hia first entrance, standing in the desert waving down the stage, he cuts an impressive figure as the Ringo Kid, who has busted out of jail in order to be revenged on the Plummers, killers of his father and brother. But Wayne's appearance is delayed while Ford explores the characters of the other travellers on the coach. Each is deftly and memorably sketched in. Dallas, (Claire Trevor), the girl who is no better than she should be, and who is run out of town, together with drunken Doc Boone, by the puritanical ladies of the Law and order League. Peacock (Donald Meek), a timid whiskey salesman; Hatfield (John Carradine), a southern gambler; Mrs Mallory (Luise Platt), the pregnant wife of a cavalry officer; and Gatewood (Berton Churchill), a banker who is making off with the assets. On the outside of the coach are Buck (Andy Devine), the portly driver, and Curly (George Bancroft), the local sheriff. The interaction between this oddly assorted group allows Ford to explore a cherished theme, the superior moral qualities of those whom 'respectable' society disdains.

Stagecoach was the first film Ford shot in Monument Valley, a landscape of towering sandstone buttes on the border between Utah and Arizona. As the tiny c oach makes its way through the vastness of the desert, the frailty of its occupants is doubly emphasized as the camera tracks toward a group of Indians observing its progress. Ford makes no attempt to present the Indians as individuals; they are merely a force of nature. The film's healthy performance at the box office helped re-establish the Western genre and cemented John Wayne's position as a major Hollywood force.

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The Grapes of Wrath

Few American pictures in the 1930's got to grips with the suffering and dislocation of the Great Depression. Hollywood largely left it to other media such as the theater, novels, and photography to document the national disaster.John Steinbeck's novel, first published in 1939, was based on solid research, following dispossessid farming families from Oklahoa as they journeyed to the orchards of California in search of casual labor.

Despite objections from the conservative financiers wno controlled the studio, Darryl Zanuck bought the book for 20th-Century Fox. He knew that John Ford was the right man to direct, with his feeling for the American people and their history. Ford also identified what was most heartbreaking about the plight of the Joad family - not their acute poverty, but the psychological trauma of being uprooted from their home, of being cast out on the road, rootless. In a memorable scene Ma Joad (Jane Darwell) burns the possessions she can't take with her the night before they must abandon their farm.

For his hero, Tom Joad, Ford cast Henry Fonda, who had just appeared in Ford's 'Young Mr. Lincoln' (1939) and Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), two other pieces of Americana. Members of the unofficial John Ford stock comany to appear include Russell Simpson as Pa Joad, John Qualen as their friend Muley, and John Carradine as an itinerant preacer. And for his cameraman Ford made an inspired choice. Gregg Toland captured brilliantly the documentary look of the pictures that had been taken of the dustbowl tragedy by government-employed photographers such as Dorothea Lange. No-where is this better seen than in a sequence where the Joads drive into a squatters camp, the camera dwelling on the grim faces of the occupants and on the run-down shacks where they live.

Though The Grapes of Wrath does not shirk from showing the full enormity of its subjects' plight, there is a significant departure from the novel. In Steinbeck's book the Joads first find easier conditions in a government-run camp, but by the end are recuced to starvation wages. In the film, they find the government camp later on, thus making their progress an upward curve, marked by Ma's final speech: 'We're the people...We'll go on forever.'