Jandy Hardesty’s review published on Letterboxd:
Film 10 for the Letterboxd Season Challenge. The other films I plan to watch for the challenge are here.
Week 10: Western Week
Challenge: Watch an unseen western directed by John Ford, Sergio Leone, or Budd Boetticher
I'd seen most of Ford's and Leone's major films, and while I'm a little less well-versed in Boetticher, I couldn't resist the opportunity of diving a little deeper into Ford's rich catalog. Ford rarely disappoints me and he didn't here.
This is a pretty straight-forward western, riffing a good bit on his earlier (and much more iconic, for all the right reasons) Stagecoach, with a pair of horse traders hired on to protect a Mormon covered wagon train. A good bit of the film is just good people-hanging-out-on-a-wagon-train stuff, which is fine by me, as I really like slice of life type westerns.
I expected it to pick up at some point though, because the truly abrupt opening isn't the wagon train or even the horse traders - it's a wanted poster for the Clegg gang and the end of a bank robbery they just pulled off, wounding one of them in the process. Sure enough, the Cleggs show up before too long, increasing the tension on the wagon train by a whole lot.
But it's not just outlaws bringing danger, of course - there are Navajo, there's a traveling "doctor" and his two comely assistants, there's a long desert with no water, and there's a rough trip over some mountains that's almost as fascinating as the "wagons-over-the-cliff" scene in The Big Trail.
There's no John Wayne along this time, though, even though this film is chronologically sandwiched in among several of Ford's finest films with Wayne - instead our main wagon master is Ben Johnson, who I've previously only seen in the elegiac The Last Picture Show, and while it's hard to beat him as Sam the Lion, he's very watchable here, with an easy charm that definitely made me want to see more of his golden age films. The Cleggs are a motley crew that add a lot of variety to the cast, while Jane Darwell is pretty underused, especially thinking back to how wonderful she was in Ford's The Grapes of Wrath.
After watching a movie, I always rank it on my Flickchart, a website for ranking movies and creating a list of your favorite movies. Here's how Wagon Master entered my chart.
Wagon Master > Springtime in the Rockies
Wagon Master > Stage Fright
Wagon Master < Edward Scissorhands
Wagon Master < Divided We Fall
Wagon Master > Henry V (1944)
Wagon Master < The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Wagon Master < Dr. Strangelove
Wagon Master < 13 Assassins
Wagon Master < Edge of Tomorrow
Wagon Master < Ex Machina
Wagon Master < Rififi
Wagon Master < Aladdin
Final #778 out of 3561