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
6 - Stagecoach and the Quest for Selfhood
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
Stagecoach, in its day, was more often characterized as a melodrama than as a Western. And it is true that what we might call the salvation of a woman, as well as the formation of a romantic couple, is central to Stagecoach's narrative. Yet on the whole the roles of women in Stagecoach, and in John Ford's films in general, seem much more conventional than in the Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s that Stanley Cavell has dubbed “comedies of remarriage” and “melodramas of the unknown woman.” In the course of Stagecoach, not one but two women achieve a new perspective. However, neither Dallas nor Lucy has much in common with the heroic leading women of such films as The Philadelphia Story (1940) or Now, Voyager (1942), women who are passionately committed to their quests for selfhood.
Stagecoach seems to have more to do with such matters as social class and prejudice. On those matters, the film judges American society – “civilization” – to be wanting. In the end, when Curley (allied with Doc) subverts the “rule of law” he is sworn to uphold, Dallas and Ringo are free to “settle down” on his ranch – but only south of the border, in Mexico, a place outside “civilization,” to which they will never be free to return.
What does Dallas want? She wants to be a mother, for one thing. And she wants Ringo.
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- Information
- John Ford's Stagecoach , pp. 158 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002