Stagecoach (1966)

Nearly everyone reading this (hi, Mum!) will know the plot of this one, though not this version of it, so to keep matters short: a diverse group of travellers on a stagecoach to Cheyenne – saloon girl Dallas (Ann-Margret), alcoholic Doctor Boone (Bing Crosby), Marshal Wilcox (Van Heflin), comic relief whiskey salesman Peacock (Red Buttons), Southern-born gambler Hatfield (Mike Conners), pregnant cavalry captain’s wife Lucy Mallory (Stefanie Powers), banker with a case full of stolen money Gatewood (Robert Cummings), coach driver Buck (Slim Pickens) and eventually outlaw-with-a-cause Ringo Kid (Alex Cord) – have to survive natural and human dangers. Which is the sort of thing that happens travelling during one of the endless wars between the US military and the pre-colonial native population.

Though, to put that right in front, the film really isn’t interested at all in any more modern view on these wars or on the Lakota as a people, using both as forces of nature that endanger and kill anybody coming too close. So if this traditional approach bothers you too much, you’ll not be happy with the movie; but then you’ll probably not be happy with much of the canon of US Westerns.

Speaking of canon, this is indeed a remake of one of the great, canonical classics of its genre (probably Hollywood cinema as a whole), John Ford’s Stagecoach. Remaking this sort of certified masterpiece is a bit of a fool’s errant, the kind of endeavour seldom bound to earn praise from critics or audiences (though the latter may have been more tolerant in the home video-less times when this was made). It’s also somewhat arrogant. However, at least in my view, Gordon Douglas was a genre director who was not actually a lesser filmmaker than Ford. As a matter of fact, if I had to choose to between both, I’d most probably go with Douglas as my preferred director. But then, I do prefer working filmmakers like Douglas who still managed to develop a voice of their own to professional crafters of masterpieces like Ford. Though I have taken a decade or so to watch enough of Douglas’s films to truly appreciate him as more than a guy who just happened to make a lot of good Westerns and my favourite US giant monster movie. All of which does not mean I don’t appreciate quite a few of Ford’s films (and his original Stagecoach is surely one of the great Westerns).

Much of this is simply a matter of taste, Douglas lacking certain things that can drive me to distraction with Ford: as a rule, Douglas’s movies tend to be less socially conservative, feeling more genuinely concerned with the outsiders of society, and less beholden to a nostalgia which can sometimes become cloying in Ford, particularly connected to a kind of sentimentality that simply does not work for me. Though the original Stagecoach is one of Ford’s least conservative movies in some regards, particularly the ending. Douglas also does not generally delve as deeply into the abyss of odious comic relief as Ford, usually relaxing the tension in his films in ways more based on the simple joys of human companionship, though the film at hand does indeed feature the Peacock/Boone combo doing some comic relieving.

Which indeed he does a lot in his version of Stagecoach, in between often genuinely wonderful scenes in which the characters reveal or discover their true natures in their shared encounters with danger. Interestingly, most of the characters are better than the world or they themselves believe to be, finding strength and dignity in the business of survival, most of them looking to stay their better versions in the future. There are exceptions of course: Gatewood learns exactly nothing about himself or the world, and – alas, quite realistically – Crosby’s alcoholic doctor sobers up quite heroically in the moment of greatest need but is back to the bottle immediately afterwards.

But then, Crosby’s sobering up is a great moment anyway. The actor shifting from humorous alcoholic wreck to a rather wise man about his business is staged and played with great dramatic and emotional heft that’s further strengthened exactly by the fact he has been part of the comic relief – though a more complicated one than his partner – until now. Crosby, not exactly an actor I’d expect this sort of performance from (I generally prefer him as a crooner and in musicals), does play the alcoholic very well indeed, suggesting the man buried under the bottle even in his silliest scenes.

As a whole, Douglas’s cast is pretty fantastic, in individual moments as well as in their interplay, all giving performances a step above their usual quality, which is saying quite something in a lot of these cases. Ann-Margret is heartbreakingly beautiful and intense at this stage in her career before starting to border on camp caricature, and really seems to embody the confusion of a young woman who already has seen quite a bit of crap in her time. Now, she is confronted with the roles she is allowed by society to play, none of whom seems to fit very well, and finds an opening to something happier (because this is a kind film at heart). Alex Cord, never much of an actor, brings something awkward, but also simple, straightforward and honest to Ringo that doesn’t feel as much as a performance but like watching a guy finding the thing he is best at; that not much in this line came afterwards for the actor is a bit of a shame, but so it goes.

Visually, Stagecoach ‘66 is just as excellent as it is in its character work. Douglas uses the much enhanced technical possibilities he had compared to the original to their fullest, staging stagecoach sequences and sometimes surprisingly brutal violence (particularly in a film that seems not at all influenced by the budding revisionist tendencies in Western, nor by what the Italians started doing) Ford simply couldn’t have realized at the time when he made the original, adding action and stunts that are often incredibly exciting and intense, as well as varied in their approach. Action and characters do tend to feed into each other rather wonderfully, as well, really turning this not just into my favourite version of Stagecoach but into one of my favourite US Westerns.