Stagecoach

1939 Western

Rating: 17/20

Plot: An early CBS experiment in reality television, this puts nine strangers in a stagecoach in 1880s Arizona, right in the middle of Apache territory with cameras watching them 24 hours a day. There's an outlaw, a corrupt banker, a couple broads, a horny guy, a wino, a Slim Whitman impersonator, a sheriff, and a guy in a gopher costume. Apaches, as any history book would accurately tell you, are bloodthirsty fiends, and when Geronimo's impromptu game of Smear the Queer is interrupted by stagecoach dust, the passengers find themselves in a little trouble. Luckily, John Wayne has taken a break from beating women long enough to help them out.

My Uncle Barry first showed me Stagecoach when I was 4 1/2 years old. Actually, he had taken all the on/off switches off all seven of his television sets and couldn't actually show the movie. He had it memorized and performed Stagecoach all by himself, playing all the parts and using a variety of props he'd found in his neighbor's kitchen. It was pretty exciting stuff, and I was inspired to write the first hip hop lyric alluding to a John Wayne movie. I can't remember all the lyrics, but "When you was out playing Bingo / We picked up Kid Ringo / Look, there's a motherfucking dingo / Drop your pants, boys / This stagecoach is about to throw down." My uncle couldn't demonstrate all the brilliance of this Ford Western. His one-man reenactment of the big Indian chase scene is lame by comparison, and his back yard isn't nearly as perfect a setting for this story as the stunning Monument Valley. And a perverse hip thrusting that Uncle Barry would perform whenever he jumped into his John Wayne character also doesn't make much sense in retrospect. My Uncle Barry, in a suicide letter, claimed that he watched this movie over forty times with Orson Welles while he (Uncle Barry) was directing Citizen Kane. Several years later, in a separate rambling suicide letter, he made a claim that the movie Stagecoach doesn't even exist and that it's only a recurring dream he has whenever there's a quarter moon. He tried to tell me that I didn't exist either. "But I'm right here!" I'd say. "Nope," he'd answer. "You're not." Sadly, he was usually right.