Western Virtues

John Ford's Stagecoach

When Bozo drives the bus," I used to say to my fellow homeschoolers, "don't expect it to stop at the Smithsonian." That was my way of assuring parents that their children would hardly be missing some height of culture and learning that students in school would attain. I could speak from my many years of teaching college freshmen, grading their work, and talking with them outside of class. If the rare young person in a thousand could read Shakespeare with ease, it was almost certain that he had not gone to school. And he would be better looking, too, without that telltale scar on the forehead, near the frontal lobe.

That was a long time ago, and I believe more than ever that Christian parents have a lot of explaining to do if they send their children to a public school, or even to many a private or parochial school. But I also see something I had missed. It is how mass entertainment, and the expectations of others among whom those children will study and work after they have graduated from high school—and perhaps the latter is simply a way of restating the former—will suffice for the soul-curdling and intellect-rotting work that schools do. It is not Bozo driving the bus, but the inheritors of Hugh Hefner and his Playgirls, less intelligent, more depraved, more rabidly political, and slick in their presentation. Forget about expecting the bus to stop at Chartres Cathedral. Soon you will forget that such a place as Chartres even exists. You would not want to go there anyway. You will be "absorbed," as my daughter puts it.

I had underestimated the monstrous power of the institutions that deform the human imagination. That is why I am going to write for Salvo these features about films. Just as you cannot fight a creed with a story, you cannot fight a story with a creed. You need another story—a truer story, more artfully made. You cannot fight well-made art in the service of evil with poorly made art in the service of good. You need a masterpiece to fight a masterpiece. What man cannot see in image, in story, he will soon cease to believe at all.

The Role of the Western

Let us begin our journey into the world of a healthy and mature Christian imagination with a film about a journey: Stagecoach (1939), directed by the incomparable John Ford. It was not the first big-budget Western that Hollywood made, but it was the first of the great westerns, and it set the template for the future.

It's a commonplace to say that Hollywood westerns portray a West that never was. Cowboys were more courtly than savage. Whenever a few settlers established a town, a church and a school were the first public buildings to go up. Murder was not a daily occurrence. But that criticism misses the point. The Western did for thirty years what science fiction, which is hardly ever about science, began to do later on: it provided an imaginative world just on the limits of our world, to give us an unusual vantage from which to view how we live. It is easy to call for promise-keeping, manly honesty, and feminine grace from the security of your parlor, when it costs you little, and when your life is not on the line. It is a different matter when a sudden and silent arrow may lodge its fork in your heart, or when a world of savagery is nearby, dark and tempting.

The Director & His Characters

John Ford, a rough-talking and not conspicuously pious Irish Catholic who took his faith seriously, was always thinking about the benefits and the costs of civilization, the virtues that make life in community possible, and the vices that corrupt and destroy it. Stagecoach centers on the lives of several people who are being cast out of the community for crime or vice, or who can hardly find a place in the community to begin with. The hero, Ringo—a slim and youthful John Wayne—is in handcuffs. A friendly and intelligent marshal (George Bancroft) is supposed to take him back to the prison he broke out of. We don't learn much about Ringo's past, except that he was not very bad, and that he believes he must avenge the murder of his father and his brother. The murderer and his flunkies are at Lordsburg, where the stagecoach will be stopping.

The heroine, Dallas (Claire Trevor), is a saloon girl, dressed to the nines. A group of hatchet-faced old ladies wants her out of town. Ford never sentimentalizes evil. The question is not whether prostitution is bad, but whether hardheartedness and sanctimony are even worse. The ladies also have it in for Doctor Boone, a notorious drunk, and a shrewd observer of human failings. The doctor is played by Thomas Mitchell, who gets my vote for the most brilliant and versatile character actor in the history of Hollywood; you may remember him as the daft Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life.

Five more characters fill up the stagecoach, within and on top. The comic foil to the marshal, holding the reins, is Buck (Andy Devine), a courageous coward, if that makes sense, who says that his Mexican wife puts out so many children, he'll soon be father to half the province of Chihuahua. The female foil to Dallas is a young married woman from Virginia, Lucy Mallory, whose husband is in the cavalry out west. She can hardly bring herself to look at Dallas. Mr. Peacock, a little fellow played by the aptly named Donald Meek, is a whisky drummer from Kansas City, whose samples Dr. Boone energetically consumes. The tall and felinely genteel Mr. Hatfield, a card sharper (John Carradine), is a Virginia gentleman who, as it turns out, served under Mrs. Mallory's father in what he calls the war of northern aggression. He, too, does not fit. The last of the principals is the town banker, a loudmouth, who has secretly absconded with a bag full of money, but who does nothing but complain about how long it takes for the coach to get to Lordsburg.

Ford's Absolute Values

Two things complicate what ought to be a straight trip. They are related, in the person of the young married woman. The first complication is expressed in a telegraph message consisting of a single word: "Geronimo." The Apache chief is on the warpath. In other films, Ford will show great interest in the plight of the Indian; in Stagecoach it is not to the point. The second complication, which the characters learn about only when an Indian attack brings on the crisis, is that Mrs. Mallory is with child by the husband she has come out to find, and the terror pitches her into labor. Dr. Boone must then be dried out with doses of black coffee and—out of sight of the camera—vomiting.

Ford is a poet who lets the human face and significant actions speak, when a thousand words could not say as much. An example is when the people from the coach sit down at table for a meal, and the faded gentleman Hatfield, noticing that Mrs. Mallory is not comfortable sitting next to Dallas, offers to move her plate to a place near the window, where she can enjoy the cooler air. Dallas feels the insult, which she takes as a matter of course. Ringo, however, quietly takes her part, and thus begins a love affair that is remarkable for its few words and few gestures—not even a kiss.

The crucial turn comes when Mrs. Mallory gives birth, and Dallas, the only woman near, must assist. For John Ford, childbirth, the family, marriage, manliness, and womanliness are absolute values. Ringo sees Dallas holding the baby wrapped up in a blanket, and it moves him. He tells her that he has a bit of a ranch south of Lordsburg, and a house, where a man might live well—if he had a woman with him. The sexual attraction is thus fully human: it is spiritualized because it is fully grounded in the good and holy order created by God, and it spans the generations. Marriage is the tree that bears the fruit of children.

When Dr. Boone was being thrown out of town, the ladies of the Law and Order League called him worthless and shameful, while the score played an off-key parody of the revival hymn, "Shall We Gather at the River." Ford, whose films (with one startling exception—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) are filled with music, plays no hymns for the proposal that Ringo makes to Dallas. He does not need to. We are looking at man and woman at the beginning of a new creation.

Stagecoach is filled with dramatic action: a full-scale Indian attack, with the few male defenders on the coach running out of ammunition; a woman seeking a husband she fears may be dead; people who turn the corner of moral regeneration without fanfare, and in surprising ways; a showdown of three bad men against one man who would be good if he had the chance. Ford also insists upon moral laws that are greater than mere customs, the most important of which is that you must do your duty, no matter the danger, no matter that you may lose your only chance to be happy in this life, no matter that you might shrug the obligation away without blame. Ringo is not vindictive. He does not want the showdown. But what a man wants and what he must do are seldom the same.

If you are not familiar with the films of John Ford, I think you will find, with Stagecoach, that you have discovered a forthright artist of great power, whose vision is informed both by the natural virtues we have forgotten, and by the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. Were he here to read these words, no doubt he'd swear and give me a cuff to the back of the head. But the truth is what it is, Mr. Ford, and I am obliged to speak it.