MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN STAGECOACH (1939) – INTRODUCTORY LECTURE TRANSCRIPT Stagecoach (1939): Introductory Lecture Welcome to the Western. I’m glad you can be with me today. I’m going to be talking about Stagecoach, the 1939 classic that was directed by John Ford. Stagecoach is a Walter Wanger production, and it features an ensemble cast. A lot of the power of this movie is derived from its narrative structure. It’s a ship-of-fools story about a group of people travelling from the town of Tonto to the town of Lordsburg through what was called Indian Territory. There’s a revenge story in Stagecoach and a sideline that deals with leaving corrupt civilization or “town” civilization and heading towards the natural Paradise that lies in the West. There’s a corrupt banker who’s running away with his bank’s money. He gets nabbed in Lordsburg, but Ringo and his girlfriend Dallas make it all the way to Mexico. It’s kind of interesting because they’re heading towards an untamed wilderness—they’re going as far West as they possibly can and then they go South. Stagecoach was John Ford’s fiftieth Western. Down at the bottom of the right hand corner, you can see Ford, with his pipe, middle-aged by this time. He began directing in 1915, and it was a Western that put him on the A-list of directors in Hollywood in 1924. The movie was called The Iron Horse. Up on the upper left is his cinematographer. The movie was John Wayne’s eightieth Western, and it was also his break-through into the A-list—the beginning of that Wayne-Ford collaboration. Some of the interesting production notes about Ford and Stagecoach deal with the Navajo tribe that lived in Monument Valley where the movie was shot. The local Indians played the Apache. The film’s production was a huge economic boost to the impoverished population. It gave hundreds of jobs to the locals as extras, as handymen. A number were riding horses and appearing in his movies on a regular basis after Stagecoach. Eventually, Ford was adopted into the Navajo tribe and given the name, Natani Nez, which means Tall Warrior. One of the personalities in the Valley was Hosteen Tso. He was a local Navajo shaman, and he promised Ford the exact kind of cloud formations he wanted—so he was put on salary as the cloud man. The clouds duly appeared. MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN STAGECOACH (1939) – INTRODUCTORY LECTURE A funny story is that in one of the later movies, it could have been Fort Apache or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the clouds didn’t appear. And so Ford said to Tso, “What happened? The clouds didn’t appear today.” And the shaman said, “I’m sorry. The radio was broken and I didn’t get the weather report.” Looking at Monument Valley as a place—and John Ford’s presentation of the Wild West—it’s important to remember it’s an artistic as well as an imaginative construct. So, Ford worked with the materials that he had. I want to talk briefly about briefly about Art in the West: Thomas Sitter Moran—an American painter inspired by Romantic literature. And the vistas that he later interpreted in his work were all Western vistas, and all heavily romanticized. As a member of several government expeditions into the West, they had a lot of survey groups go out into the West after the Civil War and Moran went with some of them. He had firsthand experience in Yellowstone in 1871 before it became a national park. And it was his work that helped popularize it as a tourist destination. You can see this enormous space and depth that he’s able to create in his pictures. What he does is he transforms the West, they say, into an edenic Paradise. It becomes a destination for people who are looking for that natural Paradise, people who are looking to re-establish that New Jerusalem that the Puritans were so interested in. When Western expansion encroached on what was a pristine wilderness, Moran may have seen telegraph poles and roads, but he was interested in depicting a Romantic version of the West so he didn’t include any signs of civilization’s progress. Doing so, he helped lay the foundations for what became the myth of the West—what David M. Emmons says is a production of a market-driven, industrializing society. What Emmons is talking about here is the idea that when people moved into the city, and, of course, industrial society was created by a massive emigration into urban spaces, after about ten or twenty or thirty years you became nostalgic for the country you had left—for the rural setting and rural life. What came about in reaction to this kind of nostalgia was this vision of the wilderness. Crevecoeur has an interesting way of looking at the American identity. In Letters From An American Farmer, he puts forward the theory that there are geographical stages of civilization that can be charted and recognized as America pushed West towards the Pacific Ocean. In Stagecoach, there’s a wonderful mixture of John Locke’s and Thomas Hobbe’s ideas. John Locke put forward the proposition that Nature was a peaceful, pastoral, ideal place. Hobbes, on MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN STAGECOACH (1939) – INTRODUCTORY LECTURE the other hand, saw the state of Nature as being one of war. It was a violent place. It was a place that was later called by Kipling “Red in Tooth and Claw.” It was a place where you competed with another person or with the animals. Monument Valley is presented as a pristine wilderness; it’s presented as an edenic World. This is the world that the stagecoach travels through—the shots are absolutely stunning. Human beings in that place, however, are in a state of war. War’s declared at the beginning of the movie. You not only find the war being played out between the Apaches and the travelers in the stagecoach and the cavalry unit that’s out searching for Geronimo, but you also find human beings at war with themselves and with each other in the stagecoach. Something to remember about American society in the early twentieth century and the late nineteenth century when you’re thinking about this nostalgia for Nature and this aggressive push westward is that it was embodied in the person of Teddy Roosevelt, the American President. Roosevelt, in his later years, really adopted that Western persona in his dress and in his manner. There’s a picture of him with his Roughriders. Very much a man’s man, Roosevelt had a sickly childhood. He became rehabilitated through exercise, and he went out West to recover his health. He fell in love with ranching; he fell in love with riding horses; he fell in love with the whole Western mythology. Coming from a very wealthy family and being very adventurous, he was actually able to play out his fantasies. Political cartoons about Roosevelt, when he was in politics, also go back to the Western as well. Frederic Remington, the painter, made an awful lot of money and his reputation by producing the Wild West Style, setting the Wild West style and furthering it. In 1905, he said that he knew that “the wild riders and the vacant land are about to vanish forever.” He said, “I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked, the more the panorama unfolded.” Were his portrayals of the Wild West realistic? There’s arguments that his details were realistic. He got the saddles right, he got the clothing right, but when you look at Remington’s visual style, his compositions are very, very Romantic. This is the style that John Ford adopted when he was making his Westerns. You find that there’s a low angle vision of the horses and the men on horseback. Generally, Ford’s shots would follow this composition. Ford put his camera down even lower to make it even more exaggerated. His were moving pictures. Remington was working with “the instant.” Horses are hysterical in Remington. Horses in Russell tend to be a little bit “more calm.” There’s a ton of MADE IN AMERICA: EXPLORING THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN STAGECOACH (1939) – INTRODUCTORY LECTURE action in Remington and I think it attracted the motion picture directors. So Remington’s subjects were Western. The Native Americans are Romantic figures that Rousseau would have recognized. Russell also worked with Native Americans and cowboys and cavalrymen as his subjects. You can see that his treatment of his subjects is very much like Remington’s in many ways. His colors tended to be a little bit more muted, the palette wasn’t quite as bright, but again you’re looking at low angles, you’re looking at exaggerated action, and an enormous amount of detail in terms of how the figures are represented—the whips, the hats, the horse furniture. Russell, also like Remington, produced statues in bronzes. It’s always motion when you’re looking at a Remington depiction of the Wild West. The tension is created by the motion. Here’s the work of Charles Schreyvogel. John Ford used to keep a copy of Scheyvogel beside his bed as a reference for when he was in pre-production and working on the look of his movies. Here we have an encounter of Native Americans with cavalrymen.