Almost eight full decades now have treated John Ford’s landmark western well. It holds up as a sturdy piece of storytelling, paced just right with plenty of room for its characters to breathe. More a drama than an action film, Stagecoach rescued both its genre and its star, John Wayne (a charisma machine here as a good-hearted outlaw), from B-movie oblivian. Before 1939, most talking westerns were dashed-off second-feature fluff and Wayne starred in about a jillion of them. These films featured wooden heroes who squared off against cardboard villains. They were low-budget jobs that took a few days to write, a week to shoot and less than an hour to watch. 1930s B-westerns are not without their charms today, but their aesthetic companions are old dime magazine stories and comic strips rather than anything interesting that was happening in film at the time.
Then came Stagecoach, which gave its characters hearts and souls to go with their hats and guns and the landscape of western movies was never the same afterward. What was once pure pulp could now be prestigious.
It’s the emphasis on characters that ages this film so well. The danger that lies ahead for a stagecoach occupied by the likes of a disgraced prostitute, a drunken doctor, a crooked banker, a fugitive, a shifty gambler and a Union soldier’s wife as they travel, all for their own unique reasons, across hostile territory is less important than how these people feel about that danger. And every action climax is followed by a quieter climax that’s more compelling.