The Movie: I have no idea how or when this film made it into my Netflix queue, but it must have been recommended to me by someone or by the site itself at some point. I'm not really into westerns all that much, but somehow Stagecoach ended up on my doorstep.

This film follows nine mostly unrelated people making a treacherous journey on a stagecoach through the desert during a Native American uprising. We've got the stage driver, a law enforcement agent, an escaped convict, a high society type woman, a whore, a drunken doctor, a crooked banker, a notorious gambler, and a whiskey barreller riding along. The interactions between all the people of different social classes and status made for some rather interesting situations and the filmed seemed to make a point that sometimes the "bad" people end up being better people than the "respectable" ones.

I was rather impressed with how the film ended up looking, particularly during the action sequences. Partly because this film was made in 1939 and I wasn't really expecting such great action sequences. I especially was surprised by just how smoothly the camera was able to follow horses running at full gallop, particularly because the Monument Valley location was so remote. I mean today, any family can drive there in air conditioned comfort in their SUV, but back then there were no paved roads into the area. It's a kind of cost and effort in filmmaking that we just don't see too much of today. Not when we can just fix everything with computers after the fact.

Of course being that it's more than 65 years later, I couldn't help but sit here and imagine how poorly this film must convey the splendor of Monument Valley, but then again I've seen many high quality photos and motion pictures of it my whole life, where as I mentioned before, in 1939 this was an extremely remote location seen by very few people, and I'm sure the cinematography was quite spectacular in its day.

I guess I should mention that John Wayne is in this movie, although he wasn't quite the superstar he'd eventually become.

The DVD: This is a very bare bones DVD release, although I imagine that there really wouldn't be a whole lot of "behind the scenes" type footage left over from a film of this age. The video transfer is actually rather clean with not nearly as much dust and scratches on the film as I was expecting to see, although the overall lower resolution and lack of contrast of the film stock of the day is quite evident here. It's about as clean as you can expect the video to look, really.

The audio is in the original mono, and the special features are all of the text variety, although there are a handful of trailers for this and some other films included, mostly westerns featuring the combination of director John Ford and actor John Wayne.