STACK Aug #154

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had a financing and distribution deal with United Artists. Ford and his frequent screenwriter collaborator, Dudley Nichols, now went to work on the screenplay adding complementary characters, situations and themes to the original story. Their final film script borrowed more than a little from Guy de Maupassant's celebrated short story Boule de Suif in which a prostitute shares a carriage with a number of snobbish bourgeoisie fleeing the Franco-Prussian War. The now re-titled Stagecoach related the story of nine disparate characters who take a stage from Tonto, Arizona to Lordsburg, New Mexico across empty terrain infested with Geronimo's raiding Apache Indians.

Stagecoach (1939) Directed by John Ford MOVIES THAT INFLUENCED FILM GENRES

E arly Hollywood plot and characterisation. Practically all of them featured the four then standard scenes for westerns - a bar, a hold- up, a chase and a shoot- out. These so called "horse operas" remained popular with family audiences throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s. But by the end of the decade the genre was firmly in the doldrums and out of favour with both cinemagoers and the

had been published in Collier's magazine. For a year he hawked it around the major Hollywood studios in the hope of one of them financing the project. Due to the uncertain market for the genre all of them turned it down stating, "Jack, it's just a western". Ford had directed many silent westerns during his early career, but had not made one for well over a decade. Nonetheless, he continued to believe that a motion picture based on Haycox's tale

western movies were basically simple in

John Ford on location with Navajo extras setting up the scenes of the Apache attacking the stagecoach.

could be a solid commercial hit. Finally in July 1938 his

major Hollywood studios. "B" status westerns however, were still regularly churned out by the Poverty Row studios, Republic and Monogram, primarily as serials or the bottom half of double- bill programs; all of them utterly forgettable. But a motion picture released in 1939 revitalised the genre and redefined the many myths of the west. John Ford's Stagecoach presented a sweeping and powerful drama of the American frontier that would change the way audiences and critics viewed western movies. Ford had purchased the rights to "Stage to Lordsburg", a short story by Ernest Haycox, that

perseverance paid off when he managed to sell it to independent producer, Walter Wanger, who

The composition of the group, a cross section of frontier and Eastern people all with contrasting personalities, stresses the class differences between the characters. On board riding shotgun is a gallant and incorruptible marshal and his comic side-kick driver. The passengers include a whore with a compassionate heart and a philosophising, alcoholic doctor (who have both been run out of town by the Ladies Law and Order league); a virtuously self righteous pregnant wife of a cavalry officer; a larcenous banker; a whiskey

John Ford's Stagecoach presented a sweeping and powerful drama of the American frontier...

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