Word: stagecoach
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...alone; it gave American cinema an epic sense of the nation's history. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was another watershed film, with its stunning use of deep-focus photography and its merciless character analysis of that special U.S. phenomenon, the self-made mogul. John Ford's Stagecoach brought the western up from the dwarfed adolescence of cowboy-and-Injun adventures to the maturity and stature of a legend. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain proved again the ingenuity of U.S. moviemakers to bring fresh style to the format of musical comedy...
Seven Become One. Efforts have frequently been made to vitalize the 128-year-old American institution whose roots go back to the stagecoach. In its present form, REA's history dates to 1917 when, to speed up transportation to the World War I effort, the Government forced the seven major express companies to merge. In 1929 the transportation assets of the amalgam were purchased by the railroads and designated Railway Express Agency. After World War II, the combination began to fail, and in 1959 there was even talk of nationalizing it. Giving in to pressure from Washington, the railroads...
...undisputed master. These westerns are memory films, filled with the traditions of the past, created from the anecdotes, fables, and songs that sprang from American history. But in addition to drawing on Americana, Ford created it; the characters and situations in his westerns, from The Iron Horse to Stagecoach to Ford Apache to The Searchers to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, have become as much a part of American tradition as those on which Ford originally drew. He has chronicled every conceivable part of the West, and his personal heroes are among the most fully realized characters in motion...
Ransom Stoddard, a young Eastern lawyer traveling West on Horace Greeley's advice, is in the stagecoach held up just outside of Shinbone by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), "the toughest man south of the Picket Wire." Trying to defend a woman passenger, Stoddard is beaten by Valance, left for dead, and brought to town by Tom Doniphon. Stoddard's first instinct is to demand the arrest of Liberty Valance; Doniphon tells him that law books mean nothing out West, that if Stoddard wants to take Valance, he'd better start carrying a hand...
...Fistful of Dollars. Once in a great while a western comes along that breaks new ground and becomes a classic of the genre. Stagecoach was one. So was High Noon. This year A Fistful of Dollars is the feature that dares to be different. It may well be the first western since The Great Train Robbery without a subplot. A man (Clint Eastwood) rides into town on a mule, kills a whole bunch of bad guys, kills some more bad guys, and then as a change of pace, kills some more bad guys. Then he rides out of town. Music...