Stagecoach (1939) on Netflix
Ringo Kid, escaped from prison, rides for Lordsburg to avenge his father and brother, killed by Luke Plummer. Marshal Curley Wilcox rides shotgun on the stagecoach crossing Apache country.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.8/1059,715 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Buck readies the stagecoach for the trip from Tonto in the Arizona Territory to Lordsburg, New Mexico. Among the passengers are Dallas, who was driven from town by the Law and Order League; Josiah Boone, an alcoholic doctor; Lucy Mallory, traveling to join her cavalry officer husband; and Samuel Peacock, a whiskey salesman. Hatfield, a gambler who knew Lucy years before, boards to offer his protection, and the banker Ellsworth H. Gatewood comes aboard as well. Marshal Curley Wilcox rides shotgun, looking for the Ringo Kid, who broke out of prison to avenge his father and brother. A cavalry troop escorts the coach part of the way because Geronimo and his warriors are on the warpath.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Whitehorseas Indian Chief (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Stagecoach (1939)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Every Hollywood studio turned John Ford down: big Westerns had been out of fashion since the silent era, and Ford insisted on giving the key role to John Wayne, then a B-movie actor.
- Orson Welles called the film a perfect textbook of filmmaking and said he watched it more than 40 times while preparing to make Citizen Kane.
SPOILER
This was the first of the many Westerns John Ford shot in Monument Valley, but scenes were mixed with footage from the Iverson Movie Ranch and the RKO Encino Ranch, so the landscape jumps about, right up to Ringo and Dallas leaving Lordsburg in New Mexico through unmistakable Monument Valley country.- The original negative was lost or destroyed. Peter Bogdanovich spotted an unscreened print in John Wayne's garage, and in 1970 Wayne let it be used to strike a new negative; UCLA fully restored the film in 1996.
- John Ford admitted that he took the inspiration for the film's celebrated chase scene from a painting by Frederic Remington that dates from 1907.
