As ill-advised and unnecessary remakes no-one was asking for go, 1966’s big budget high, wide and handsome CinemaScope version of
Stagecoach is rather better than its reputation even if, despite surprisingly decent reviews and making a modest profit when it came out, it’s nowhere near good enough to take on a genuinely iconic though increasingly little seen classic or to live up to producer Martin Rackin’s retort to John Ford’s criticism that ‘If you’d made it right the first time, I wouldn’t have had to do it again” (what is it they say about pride and falls again?). Rackin had history with Ford (he was one of the writers of The Horse Soldiers) and was genuinely no admirer of the original, which he dismissed as too poor even for network TV reruns, and in a way that helps in that it’s by no means a scene-for-scene retread, expanding the story and, most effectively, changing the location from Monument Valley and Arizona Territory to Wyoming Territory (though it was shot in Colorado) that gives it a very different look and feel.
Where Ford’s film was a fairly gritty and beautifully cast character study set in an often arid landscape this is more of a typical lush and colourful 60s all-star cast effort with a great use of its more verdant locations, though this time round the ensemble casting is distinctly variable, from the decent (Ann-Margret, Van Heflin, Bing Crosby on particularly strong form in his last film as the drunken doctor, Keenan Wynn), the okay (Red Buttons), the underwhelming (Mike Connors, a very flat Stefanie Powers), the outright bad (a very fey Bob Cummings channelling Tony Randall), with only the inspired casting of Slim Pickens really standing out as the perfect heir to the original’s Andy Devine as the stage driver. Oh yes, and Alex Cord, 1966’s ‘next big thing,’ an underwhelming Ringo Kid whose comparative lack of experience hobbles his best efforts to make an impact – John Wayne had a decade in the wilderness to learn his craft and what worked for him before playing the role, but his replacement is clearly still learning on the job: for much of the film it’s a decent effort but he’s particularly weak in his love scenes with Ann-Margret. None of them are bad enough to get in the way of the story nor good enough to distinguish it: this is just another solidly made decent enough Western with excellent production values and Scope camerawork that may not stand the test of time as a classic but does stand up well enough for its 114-minute running time.
The film definitely sags a bit in the middle before rallying in the last half hour with two terrific action setpieces, with second unit director Ray Kellog getting some incredible footage in the first of them, which also neatly plays on and subverts the original’s cavalry to the rescue moment, though the opening sequence of a brutally violent attack on a cavalry camp is in places a case of the conception being better than its execution because the pacing is just a little bit off. Nonetheless, Gordon Douglas may have been a journeyman director but at his best he was a reliable craftsman, and here he has some effective visual ideas, not least having the group’s pariahs, the Kid and Ann-Margret’s dance hall girl, eating on a lower floor beneath the rest of the passengers and their social superiors at a relay station.
There’s also a terrific early Jerry Goldsmith score that often favours leading with Jews’ harp, harmonica, banjo, trumpet and guitar with percussion initially more in support than dominance, though it isn’t always well served by the mix, which at times flattens out some of the more intricate passages and doesn’t handle some of the bolder statements too well. The film was photographed by the often great William H. Clothier (The Alamo, the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and for the most part Twilight Time’s Bluray does his work justice with a clean and for the most part detailed transfer that doesn’t suffer from any orange and teal revisionism – this has a typically bold and clear 60s color scheme with no silly tinting - though the pine forests tend to lose detail in the opening tracking shots. Like the Signal One UK release it runs into a bit of trouble with a nighttime scene in heavy rain, though that sequence gets a slightly better encode on this edition that makes it a little less flat but still far from optimum.
TT’s disc includes a new commentary by Lee Pfeiffer and Paul Scrabo, which gets off to a particularly bad start by talking of the remakers clearly holding the original in high regard (the very public feud between Ford and Rackin is one of the first things you find out about with only a little basic research: it’s covered in the 1998 Film Score Monthly CD’s liner notes, for example, though they seem unaware of that disc and cite the score’s 2012 reissue by Lalaland as its CD premiere). Like the rather better commentary by C. Courtney Joyner and Henry Parke on the Signal One UK disc there’s a lot of speculation here, albeit not as well informed - a lot of it here way off target (i.e., unaware of Norman Rockwell’s cameo as one of the poker players in the beginning of the film they place him as one of the townspeople at the end while they cite composers being on the film’s set as a common occurrence in the studio system when it has always been a rarity), though there is some good information in there.
Unlike the UK release this includes an isolated track for Goldsmith’s score and subtitles (absent on the UK disc despite a couple of scenes where Ann-Margret’s sotto dialogue is recorded very low, though that’s less of a problem on the TT disc than the Signal One release). As usual there’s also a booklet included.
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