Stagecoach (1939)

Stagecoach is a 1939 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring Claire Trevor and John Wayne. The screenplay by Dudley Nichols is an adaptation of "The Stage to Lordsburg", a 1937 short story by Ernest Haycox. The film follows an eclectic group of travelers riding on a stagecoach through dangerous Apache territory.

The film has long been recognized as an important work transcending the Western genre, and is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. In 1995, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry. Still, Stagecoach has not avoided controversy. Like most Westerns of the era, its depiction of Native Americans as mere savages has been criticized.

Stagecoach was the first of many Westerns that Ford shot in Monument Valley, on the Arizona–Utah border in the American Southwest. Some scenes blended shots of Monument Valley with those filmed on the Iverson Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, California, RKO Encino Ranch, and elsewhere, and as a result geographic incongruities appear.