Ciara Moloney
Claiming that John Ford is the greatest director of all time is like saying Shakespeare is the greatest playwright, Mozart is the greatest classical composer, or The Beatles are the greatest rock band. It seems like a cliché masquerading as an opinion. It rings false just because you’ve heard it all before. But then I sit down and watch a supposedly minor Ford – like with Shakespeare, like with The Beatles – and it blows my hair back. Received wisdom, it turns out, is wisdom all the same.
Wagon Master, released 75 years ago this week, gets overlooked in a filmography that includes the likes of Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Yet Ford told Peter Bogdanovich that Wagon Master – along with similarly sidelined The Fugitive and The Sun Shines Bright – “came closest to being what I wanted to achieve.” It was a flop on release, which Tag Gallagher, in his book on Ford, calls “no surprise”: “It was a personal project, with no stars, little story, deflated drama, almost nothing to attract box office or trendy critics.” When filming on location in Utah for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, local stories of early Mormon expeditions inspired Ford to write his first screen story in twenty years (his son Patrick Ford and Frank S. Nugent developed it into a screenplay). The resulting film is both intimate and epic: a loose-limbed, ensemble-driven tale that trundles along like a wagon train, while cumulatively, covertly telling the story of America itself.
As the film starts, Mormons are being driven out of Crystal City. They’re not the only ones. “As long as they’re out of town by 7:30,” one character says, “That’s their deadline. Mormons, Cleggses, show folks, horse-traders.” He’s 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 – a pilgrimage to the promised land over the San Juan River – but for that they’ll 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’re out on the trails together, each of the boys immediately becomes one of them. They’re not Mormons, and there’s no implication they ever will be, but their difference includes no sense of apartness. They’re all on this journey together.
That’s what Wagon Master, 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’s about how outsiders can find community with each other. “This most leisurely and lyrical of westerns,” Dennis Lim writes for the LA Times, “takes shape mainly as a series of encounters among disparate groups, as they clash, adapt to one another or become integrated into a larger whole.”
The Mormon wagon train is a rolling stone that gathers moss. That starts with Travis and Sandy, but they’re soon joined by medicine show folk. They were also run out of Crystal City. “Well,” Wiggs counters, “they was invited out, like we was.” Some of the more pious object to the medicine show folk joining the wagon train, since, as Wiggs puts it, “they have, what I used to call in my sinning days, a hoochie-coochie show.” But Wiggs sets them straight, saying that God must have put these people here for a reason – so that the Mormons might help them. Soon, like Travis and Sandy, they become adopted as the community’s own.
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 “says the Mormons are his brothers. He says they’re not big thieves like most white men, just little thieves.” 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’t 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’s melting pot, sometimes a nightmare defined by violence, racism and greed. Wagon Master feels like one of the last times that optimism could survive undiluted.
‘Wagon Master” is streaming on Tubi and available for digital rental or purchase.
