Stage Coach Film Analysis

The movie Stage Coach, directed by John Ford, takes place in Monument Valley, Utah. This was the first western, in which the public would first see Monument Valley, which would become a favorite filming location of exterior sequences for John Ford in many of his westerners to come. The premise of the movie is based on a crew taking a stagecoach from Tonto to Lordsburg while in the meantime trying to avoid the Geronimo and Apaches in his way. In the film, The Ringo Kid’s call to actions comes from both the false accusations against him and more seriously the murders of his father and brother.
In this film, the main character The Ringo kid, played by John Wayne, portrays one of the ideal male ideologies of the time. In this case “The Ringo kid”, was the virile adventurer, the potent, untrammeled man of action (Wood). Similar to many westerners to come, Stage Coach embodies the construction of

Very clearly the title of the movie itself, stagecoach, represents a metaphor of the interactions of the civilized and wild. A stagecoach is a carriage with wheels that is pushed by a house in order to travel. It is a metaphor for civilized society because civilized society has found a way to tame a wild horse, or the wild, and use it for his or her own needs. As said in our book, “ the stagecoach is a machine built by civilized hands that sets out to tame the vast western waste” (253). In this film John Ford usages the settling of the frontier as his basics myth. He creates a center metaphor of the American spirit and its needs to tame the wild wilderness of the west (252). Stage Coach also accomplishes this by showing the “savageness” of the Apaches who are fighting their own war. Not much is mentioned along of the Apaches or their war, but their presents sets an attitude of wildness and savageness in the west that must be civilized with the help of the American