Flawed Characters in Ford's Stagecoach (1939)

Respectability as a Foil for Nobility in First Modern Western Movie

Jun 24, 2009

The respectable-seeming characters in the film Stagecoach are flawed individuals whose social prejudice lacks compassion and violates the frontier mythos of equality.

There are three major categories of characters in Ford's Stagecoach: the respectable-seeming, the disreputable (seeming and actual), and the stalwart frontiers characters.

The respectable-seeming folk in Stagecoach think they are above such disreputable sorts as prostitutes, drunks, gamblers, and jailbirds. Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) captures this best in his remark to Dallas (Claire Trevor): “We’re the victims of a foul disease called social prejudice, my child.” His allusion to the French Revolution, ”Take my arm, Madame le Comtesse. The tumbrel awaits. To the guillotine!” invokes thoughts of inverted social class and privilege. It also offers a subtle reference to the French short story, de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, an important emotional source for Stagecoach.

Ladies’ League Aims to “Scour Dregs” From Tonto

The most obvious examples of the respectable-seeming characters in Stagecoach are the ladies of the Law and Order League who are “scouring out the dregs of the town.” Their haughty manner is a chilling marker of growing “civilization,” creating sympathy for Dallas as they march her to the stagecoach (to an ironic “Shall We Gather at the River”). To them, only they and their ilk have a legitimate place, even as Dallas questions this tearfully: “Doc, haven’t I any right to live? What have I done?”

Similar to these ladies are Lucy’s friends in Tonto and Lordsburg. In Tonto, one friend pulls her skirts aside rather than brush against a “notorious gambler.” In Lordsburg, even the maid who takes the baby from Dallas is high-handed, despite Dallas’s kindnesses to Lucy.

Banker Gatewood Driven by Greed

Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill) is another example of seeming respectability. As head of the Miners’ & Cattlemens’ Bank , he seems stolid and respectable, dresses conservatively and is married to the ladies’ Law and Order league chairwoman. He is first seen arrogantly delivering a lecture on financial responsibility to men delivering a company payroll, admonishing them : “Remember this. What’s good for the banks is good for the country.”

Gatewood serves as grotesque personification of Republican greed, spouting self-serving platitudes to bolster his status. His jingoistic patriotism and complaints of government interfering with business (“Why, they’re even talking now about having bank examiners, as if we can’t run our own banks.”) create barriers between him and others. When things don’t suit, he blames others (“I don’t know what the government is coming to!”) and threatens them with his influential contacts. Eventually he gets so annoying that Hatfield (John Carradine) threatens to make him walk and finally Doc Boone punches him unconscious.

The banker’s talk, of course, is undercut by his actions. He is in the act of embezzling $50,000 from his bank, has lied about receiving a telegram calling him to Lordsburg, and is abandoning his (admittedly shrill, sanctimonious) wife. These are hardly the actions of an upstanding citizen.

Gatewood is the only main character without growth, a lampoon which, according to Maland’s 2003 essay, “Powered by a Ford?”, serves Nichols and Ford effectively in conveying their sympathies for New Deal politics. Gatewood is so unsympathetic the audience is pleased when he is arrested in Lordsburg and dragged off to jail.

Lucy Mallory, Southern Lady and Steel Magnolia

Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), daughter of a Confederate Army officer and wife to cavalry Captain Richard Mallory, has traveled from Virginia to join her husband in Lordsburg. Lucy mostly seems in sympathy with the Law and Order ladies and her snobby friends, behaving with disdain to Dallas. Her behavior is cruel when she refuses Dallas’s offer of her shoulder to rest on, accepts Hatfield’s offer to reseat herself away from Dallas at the dining table in Dry Forks, and rejects Dallas’s sympathy on news of Captain Mallory’s injury in Apache Wells.

Studler suggests, in her 2003 article “Be A Proud Glorified Dreg,” that Lucy’s (and Hatfield’s) presence out west reflects a breakdown of southern social order. A more sympathetic interpretation categories her as a “steel magnolia,” a Southern archetype of determination and strength behind the stereotypic image of fragile womanhood. Traveling alone cross-country is not for wimps and if Lucy shows pre-occupation with herself, huddling in the corner of the stagecoach while Dallas cares for the baby, one can be sympathetic toward a woman who has just given birth and is fearful that the very husband to whom she travels may be seriously wounded. Her final offer of support to Dallas is not as dramatic a growth as one might want, but growth it is.

In looking at these examples of so-called respectability, Studlar argues that “the irrelevancy of the socially ‘superior’ classes to the safe passage of the stagecoach and to the resolution of the main protagonists’ conflicts may be read as Ford’s way of asserting the functional inferiority of the social elite, their lack of vitality and adaptation to Western democracy, and, of course, their ultimate irrelevancy to the primary concerns of the Western as a myth” (p.152). It also foreshadows Ford’s darker explorations of encroaching “civilization” in The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Sources

Maland, C.J. (2003). “ ‘Powered by a Ford’?: Dudley Nichols, Authorship, and Cultural Ethos in Stagecoach.” In B. K. Grant (Ed.), John Ford's Stagecoach ( pp. 48 to 81). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ Press.

Studlar, G. (2003.) “ ‘Be a Proud, Glorified Dreg:’ Class, Gender, and Frontier Democracy in Stagecoach." In B.K. Grant (Ed.), John Ford's Stagecoach (pp. 132 to 157). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ Press.

The copyright of the article Flawed Characters in Ford's Stagecoach (1939) in Film Westerns is owned by Susan Z. Swan. Permission to republish Flawed Characters in Ford's Stagecoach (1939) in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.