Director John Ford hadnt made a western for 13 years before filming 'Stagecoach' in 1939. This is not just one his best westerns, but also one of the best in the genre.
A Stagecoach is travelling from the frontier town of Tonto in Arizona, to the New Mexico town of Lordsburg. Amoungst the travellers aboard are a young prostitute who has been thrown out of the town, a drunken Doctor, a woman who is on her way to meet her husband who is in the army, a banker, a salesman, a gambler and a young man who has broken from prison to avenge his familys deaths. Rounding up the group are the coach driver and a sheriff who is riding shotgun.
They are to be escorted on the journey by the US Cavalry due to the fact that apache chief Geronimo is in the area and is on the war path, the Cavalry leader tells the sheriff they are really riding at their own risk.
The strengths of this film are in the characters and location of Monument Valley, a location Ford loved that much he would return to shoot the likes of 'My Darling Clementine' and 'The Searchers' there.
The characters are all great to watch, the film is most notably a tightly scripted character study. All the stagecoach travellers are very diffrent people and have to get along with the threat of an Apache attack more than likely to take place. At best here is Thomas Mitchell as the drunken doctor Boone and Claire Trevor as the disgraced prostitute Dallas, John Carradine is also watchable as the gentleman gambler Hatfield. John Wayne is ok here, in his first collabaration of many with director Ford, he doesn't really come into his own as dominant screen force as he would later in other films with Ford at the helm, but his character Ringo Kid is atleast intresting and Wayne does his best.
The is underneath the thin layer of this film an insight into characters who are in a way dissmisive of one an other, but who must come to some kind of understaning if they are to make it through Monument Valley alive with the Apaches crawling the area.
Whilst the film has many highlights the finale is a great piece of action with great stunt work from the legendry stunt man Yakima Canutt, one of these really does defy belief and is so well staged.
John Fords first western since the silent era of cinema is a great piece of work and one of the best fims to emerge from a year which saw such releases as 'Gone With the Wind'. This certainly is up there with Fords best westerns, a genre in which he had a deft touch.