Stagecoach (1939)
Stagecoach (1939)
Director: John Ford
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols from an original story by Ernest Haycox
Stars: John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine and John Carradine
The Pitch: “Hey,let’s make a western that’s more than just white hats vs black hats.”
Tagline: Danger holds the reins as the devil cracks the whip ! Desperate men ! Frontier women ! Rising above their pasts in a West corrupted by violence and gun-fire !
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Stagecoach is not only one of the best westerns ever made, but one of the best movies ever made. It has it all, danger, romance, humor, mystery and more. It could actually be the film that laid the ground work for disaster/apopcalyptic movies. Throw a group of strangers together and drop in a disaster and see what shakes out.
The strangers include: The stage driver and his partner riding shotgun, an alcoholic doctor and a prostitute (who’ve been run out of town), a gambler, a pregnant woman, a bank manager (who has a bag of stolen money) and an escaped convict seeking revenge for the murder of his father and brother.
The stagecoach is traveling through Apache territory in the middle of an uprising. As they get deeper and deeper into Indian territory, the odds of their surviving are dropping fast.
This is the movie that made John Wayne a star.
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