The best Western since The Covered Wagon! Two women and seven men, a motley nine, in a swaying stagecoach behind galloping horses. Death rides beside them, behind them, ahead of them. The Apaches under Geronimo are in the saddle and the careening coach is trying to reach safety. This isn't just a melodrama of the pioneer ‘80s, when the redskins were making their last desperate thrusts at oncoming civilization. It is oddly intimate, strangely gripping, absorbingly detailed as it reveals the reactions of the nine hunted humans. There's a painted lady whose morals are none too good, and a dissolute doctor, ordered out of the last coach stop; there's a bad man with a price on his head; the Ringo Kid, trying to get to the next stop to shoot it out with the three killers of his brother; there's a young wife seeking her army-captain husband; there's a frontier gambler who once was a Virginia gentleman; there's a timid little liquor salesman; there's a banker with a strange black bag — and there's a cold, hard sheriff.

If the ride of the nine through the desert country doesn't enthrall you, I don't know movie audiences. For Stagecoach has everything: sweep, action, sympathy, humor. And performances! John Wayne, who has been doing little Westerns for a long time, rides out of the pages of our West to success as the Ringo Kid. He makes the ruthless gent a real, hard-bitten frontiersman. Claire Trevor is splendid as the girl shunned by outpost women. But Thomas Mitchell darn near steals the film as the drunken frontier doctor who laughs in the face of death — and takes another drink.

VITAL STATISTICS: John Wayne started as a screen actor in 1931 with this same megaphone wielder, John Ford. Out of the University of Southern California, where he had played football, he had gotten a job as assistant property man. Ford needed an actor for a bit; Wayne was it. In no time at all he was playing leads in horse operas. And he's gone his way doing ‘am. Wayne, whose real name is Marion Michael Morrison, hails from Iowa.... John Ford has made films for twenty years. His best job was The Informer, for which Dud Nichols also supplied the words. He made that epic of nasty weather, Hurricane, too.... Louise Platt is the daughter of a United States navy lieutenant commander-physician. She went to high school in Manila, was educated at six of Uncle Sam's distant outposts.

Publication Date: May 13, 1939