Stagecoach

More like "Clowncoach"

If you’ve ever been watching a Western and thought, “Man, I wish instead of all the shooting and chasing and excitement there was more talking about feelings and scenes of childbirth,” Stagecoach is the Western for you.  That’s not to say that the genre stand-bys are completely absent.  There’s plenty of hats, saloons, and casual racism (for those of you keeping track at home, White People > Mexicans > “Savages.”)  There’s also a surprisingly large amount of historical context.  I suspect the filmmakers wanted to make a History Channel documentary, but it was 1939 and no one had invented dramatic voiceovers yet.

Around half the movie is just shots of a stagecoach traveling through a desert, so you can’t accuse the movie of false advertising.  Inside the stagecoach are too many people for its actual size.  Like an episode of The Real World: Dodge City, they are carefully picked to stir up conflict with each other.  One has a drinking problem, one pretends to be shocked by all the debauchery around her, and one is probably going to come out of the closet later on.  Unlike The Real World, only one seems likely to have drunken sex with her coachmates.  For this, she’s shunned by the more puritanical members of the coach, who believe you should only seduce married women through your genteel Southern charms.

Not Young John Wayne though.  I didn’t recognize him at first since he actually showed roughly two and a half emotions over the course of the movie.  He’s more than happy to defend the honor of the good-time gal and proposes marriage to her the first time they’re alone.  Sure, it seems rushed, but he’s been in prison for years and she’s just happy someone wants her despite her road-tested vagina.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward:  Barely.  There was this bit with a “savage” singing and I just couldn’t take it.