Stagecoach (1939), in its day, was more often characterized as a melodrama than as a western. It is true that what we might call the salvation of a woman and the formation of a romantic couple are central to its narrative. Yet on the whole the roles of women in Stagecoach, and in John Ford's films in general, seem more conventional than in the Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s that Stanley Cavell has dubbed “comedies of remarriage” and “melodramas of the unknown woman.” In the course of Stagecoach, not one but two women achieve a new perspective. However, neither Dallas nor Lucy has much in common with the heroines of such films as The Philadelphia Story or Now, Voyager, women who are passionately committed to their quests for selfhood. The leading “classical” genres embrace an Emersonian philosophical perspective. Ford's cinema, like Hitchcock's, stands in an uneasy relationship to that philosophy.

Stagecoach seems to have more to do with such matters as social class and prejudice. On those matters, the film judges American society – “civilization” – to be wanting. In the end, when Curly (allied with Doc) subverts the rule of Law he is sworn to uphold, Dallas and Ringo are free to settle down on his ranch – but only south of the border, in Mexico, a place outside “civilization,” to which they will never be free to return.

What does Dallas want? She wants to be a mother, for one thing. And she wants Ringo.