Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments and Credits
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Spokes in the Wheels
- 1 Stagecoach and Hollywood's A-Western Renaissance
- 2 “Powered by a Ford”? Dudley Nichols, Authorship, and Cultural Ethos in Stagecoach
- 3 That Past, This Present: Historicizing John Ford, 1939
- 4 “A Little Bit Savage”: Stagecoach and Racial Representation
- 5 “Be a Proud, Glorified Dreg”: Class, Gender, and Frontier Democracy in Stagecoach
- 6 Stagecoach and the Quest for Selfhood
- Reviews of Stagecoach
- Filmography
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2 - “Powered by a Ford”? Dudley Nichols, Authorship, and Cultural Ethos in Stagecoach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments and Credits
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Spokes in the Wheels
- 1 Stagecoach and Hollywood's A-Western Renaissance
- 2 “Powered by a Ford”? Dudley Nichols, Authorship, and Cultural Ethos in Stagecoach
- 3 That Past, This Present: Historicizing John Ford, 1939
- 4 “A Little Bit Savage”: Stagecoach and Racial Representation
- 5 “Be a Proud, Glorified Dreg”: Class, Gender, and Frontier Democracy in Stagecoach
- 6 Stagecoach and the Quest for Selfhood
- Reviews of Stagecoach
- Filmography
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
By rights this new art form [the movies] should be controlled by individuals who include all functions in themselves. They should be film-makers. But the functions are too diversified and complex to be handled by the creative energy of one individual. So we break them down into separate crafts – writing, directing, photography, scenic designing, optical printing and camera effects, cutting and assembly of film, composing music, recording, mixing and re-recording, the making of … transitions; into an immense field of works which require the closest and most harmonious collaboration to produce excellent results.
– Dudley Nichols, “The Writer and the Film”Upon the release of Stagecoach early in 1939, Frank S. Nugent concluded his enthusiastic and influential New York Times review by writing, “This is one stagecoach that's powered by a Ford.” Embedded in this comment is the widely shared assumption that director John Ford is the unequivocal auteur of Stagecoach, the creative genius who revived a genre that had been nearly comatose – at least in A-productions – since the introduction of sound a decade earlier. It is an assumption that many film historians and analysts have shared in considering this landmark Western. Although it would be foolish to deny Ford's central contributions to Stagecoach – he clearly was a driving force in making the film what it was – this essay contends that Stagecoach is powered not solely by a Ford but by other collaborators and cultural forces as well.
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- Information
- John Ford's Stagecoach , pp. 48 - 81Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002