Stagecoach

Stagecoach (1939) is John Ford's western you can watch online on iFILM. Nine strangers climb aboard a single coach and roll out across Apache country, with Geronimo's band somewhere ahead. The ride is long, and none of them quite trusts the others.

It's a mismatched bunch: a drunk doctor named Boone, Dallas the woman the town ran off, a stuffy banker clutching his bag, a cardsharp playing the southern gentleman, a pregnant cavalry wife, and a whiskey drummer. Out on the trail the fugitive Ringo Kid flags them down — the part that turned John Wayne overnight from a B-western extra into a leading man. As the threat of a raid grows, the passengers' class masks slip, and each turns out to be someone other than advertised.

Ford shot it in Monument Valley, the landscape he'd go on to make synonymous with the whole genre. The picture took home two Oscars, one of them for Thomas Mitchell as the boozing doc. Yakima Canutt's stunt — dropping under the speeding coach and hauling himself back up — is still copied today. This is the film that pulled the sound-era western out of cheap matinee territory and made it serious cinema. Stream Stagecoach (1939) online on iFILM.