As the film starts, Mormons are being driven out of Crystal City. They\u2019re not the only ones. \u201cAs long as they’re out of town by 7:30,\u201d one character says, \u201cThat’s their deadline. Mormons, Cleggses, show folks, horse-traders.\u201d He\u2019s lumping together a killer criminal gang (the Clegg family) with harmless people who the community have deemed undesirables. The Mormons, led by Elder Wiggs (Ward Bond), are going to make their way west \u2013 a pilgrimage to the promised land over the San Juan River \u2013 but for that they\u2019ll need a wagon master. Somebody who knows the trails. Somebody like Travis (Ben Johnson) or Sandy (Harry Carey, Jr.), a couple of young, strapping horse traders not long back from Navajo country. Though they initially turn down the job, Travis and Sandy quickly change their mind. It might be because they heard the bigoted things the townspeople had to say about them and Mormons in the same breath; it might be because they saw a pretty girl in their group; they might just have wanted to hit the road again. But once they\u2019re out on the trails together, each of the boys immediately becomes one of them. They\u2019re not Mormons, and there\u2019s no implication they ever will be, but their difference includes no sense of apartness. They\u2019re all on this journey together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s what Wagon Master<\/em>, in all its incidental singsongs and sense of adventure, is really about: it is a sincere, open-hearted film that drives ceaselessly towards solidarity. It\u2019s about how outsiders can find community with each other. \u201cThis most leisurely and lyrical of westerns,\u201d Dennis Lim writes for the LA Times<\/em><\/a>, \u201ctakes shape mainly as a series of encounters among disparate groups, as they clash, adapt to one another or become integrated into a larger whole.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Mormon wagon train is a rolling stone that gathers moss. That starts with Travis and Sandy, but they\u2019re soon joined by medicine show folk. They were also run out of Crystal City. \u201cWell,\u201d Wiggs counters, \u201cthey was invited out, like we was.\u201d Some of the more pious object to the medicine show folk joining the wagon train, since, as Wiggs puts it, \u201cthey have, what I used to call in my sinning days, a hoochie-coochie show.\u201d But Wiggs sets them straight, saying that God must have put these people here for a reason \u2013 so that the Mormons might help them. Soon, like Travis and Sandy, they become adopted as the community\u2019s own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At another point, the wagon train encounters a group of Navajo, who initially appear hostile. But on learning that the group are Mormon, their demeanour changes: as translated by Sandy, their leader \u201csays the Mormons are his brothers. He says they’re not big thieves like most white men, just little thieves.\u201d The Navajo invite the Mormons and their friends to a ceremonial dance. It is a beautiful moment of one oppressed people recognising another, for both of whom there is no other land. Yet it doesn\u2019t seem drippily utopian. The son of Irish immigrants, Ford constantly wrestled with the idea of the West, and of America: sometimes it seems like the dream of all different kinds of people coexisting in the world\u2019s melting pot, sometimes a nightmare defined by violence, racism and greed. Wagon Master<\/em> feels like one of the last times that optimism could survive undiluted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘Wagon Master” is streaming on Tubi<\/a> and available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/wagon-master2-1024x848.jpg\")
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