Spoilers herein.
This film is chintz, but should be seen for its historical value. It is perhaps the last great bit of artificial melodrama that audiences could take at face value.
The world would soon change forever. Orson Welles changed the way depth is photographed, and that is a very, very big deal. Here, we have deep focal diagonals and energetic smoke, but no shocking god's eye.
Fast upon that, many filmmakers were to soon change our notions of verism. Here we have overt staginess, teapot acting, song from outside the narrative, ultracleanliness.
The war was soon to transform America, and American films forever, introducing varieties and degrees of irony unfathomable to the audience that first saw this. What we have here are now embarrassing religious and political stances.
This is to film what Bulwer-Lytton is to novels. Don't laugh unless you have read a B-L novel. (Try `Alice.') Melodrama is defined by the shifts in societal consciousness. What's discarded is melodrama. This is a husk of what it once was, gutted not by the lack of craft in it, but by the accident of the random devolution in group narrative.
I think John Ford knew his quaint world was soon to end, and that is why he made a film about a quaint world that was soon to end. It was well known to Ford that friend Welles was watching "Stagecoach" scores of times during the filming of "Kane," and jazzing every effect, every view, every trick. He was dead and knew it.
This film is chintz, but should be seen for its historical value. It is perhaps the last great bit of artificial melodrama that audiences could take at face value.
The world would soon change forever. Orson Welles changed the way depth is photographed, and that is a very, very big deal. Here, we have deep focal diagonals and energetic smoke, but no shocking god's eye.
Fast upon that, many filmmakers were to soon change our notions of verism. Here we have overt staginess, teapot acting, song from outside the narrative, ultracleanliness.
The war was soon to transform America, and American films forever, introducing varieties and degrees of irony unfathomable to the audience that first saw this. What we have here are now embarrassing religious and political stances.
This is to film what Bulwer-Lytton is to novels. Don't laugh unless you have read a B-L novel. (Try `Alice.') Melodrama is defined by the shifts in societal consciousness. What's discarded is melodrama. This is a husk of what it once was, gutted not by the lack of craft in it, but by the accident of the random devolution in group narrative.
I think John Ford knew his quaint world was soon to end, and that is why he made a film about a quaint world that was soon to end. It was well known to Ford that friend Welles was watching "Stagecoach" scores of times during the filming of "Kane," and jazzing every effect, every view, every trick. He was dead and knew it.