My Movie Challenge

Part of the wife and I's movie challenge involves a pretty good number of westerns, something we aren't super big on. Sure, we like Unforgiven and the like, but we're going to have to bang through some desert chatter and John Ford cinematography if we expect to get through the list.

Stagecoach (1939): Our first foray into the western genre wasn't nearly as bad as we'd hoped. In fact, we enjoyed this one a good deal. It has a lot of interesting "Hey!" moments. Like the fact that it is John Wayne's first film appearance ever, and a better story exists in this film than I would have thought. A rag tag group pile into a stagecoach and make their way across Cheyenne-dominant land. Among the crew are a drunken doctor, a corrupt banker, a couple hifalutin socialite types and a prostitute. Oh, and John Wayne. The greatness of the movie is in its simplicity. The story is uncomplicated and while the characters are thinly written, it's got plenty of moments of humor and drama, including a thrilling stagecoach chase that climaxes the film. What I realize in watching this movie is that it has a lot of traits other, probably greater films possess. But it was made in 1939, decades before some of those other films. Orson Welles says Stagecoach was the most perfect piece of filmmaking he'd seen, and this was a movie he watched constantly before making a little film called Citizen Kane. High praise, I'd say.