A Film Canon

In his first sound Western, Ford relocates his democratic laughter-space from the courtroom to a stagecoach that is almost entirely populated by figures with a problematic relation to the law, including a wanted outlaw (John Wayne), a fugitive bank robber, a dubious whiskey salesman, a well-meaning prostitute, and a drunken doctor (Thomas Mitchell), the last two having been exiled from town by the Ladies of the Law and Order League, purveyors of a "foul disease called social prejudice." By making this space mobile, Ford is finally able to convey the full grandeur for which it stands - most iconically in his first use of Monument Valley, but perhaps more impressively in the final chase sequence which, with the aid of stunt co-ordinator Yakima Kanutt, transforms the coach and its pursuers into a single, whirling dervish, their actions so indistinguishable that an Indian can fall beneath a train of six horses, as well as the vehicle, and remain unscathed. Although the tone is essentially comic, the figurative prominence of the Mexican border signals an underlying pessimism; or, more accurately, an acknowledgment that this democratic space is still, at some level, a hypothetical one, contributing to the visionary register with which Ford films the valley, as if the buttes were mere ciphers for Wayne's penetrating gaze, informing the curiously static pose with which he is introduced. The result is the first systematically sublime Western; or, rather, the first systematic acknowledgment that the Western experience exceeds the ambit of a single human eye, just as the navigation of that landscape (with which the Indians are completely identified) exceeds the capacities of any single member of the stagecoach party, necessitating a collaboration whose most resonant, if understated, result, is the birth of an American messiah; a child with no name.