Quentin Tarantino on the John Wayne film ‘Stagecoach’: “It holds up beautifully today”
While Quentin Tarantino undoubtedly harbours a lifelong obsession with one of the most influential figures in the history of the western genre who endures as one of the most iconic and widely celebrated stars Hollywood has ever seen, it’s not John Wayne.
Instead, Clint Eastwood was the aspiring filmmaker’s hero both in front of the camera and behind it, with Tarantino admitting on numerous occasions that the star was both the man he wanted to be as a director and the icon he adored as a legendary antihero. He was the benchmark, the pinnacle, and the definitive example of where he wanted his career to go, and Wayne wasn’t afforded the same levels of appreciation.
Not that the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs orchestrator harbours an active dislike for ‘The Duke’ like he seems to hold for many performers and auteurs who were around at the same time, but he doesn’t think he’s worthy to lace up Eastwood’s cowboy boots. He’s happy to steal from his films, though, even if he doesn’t necessarily have to have seen them.
It was only natural that when Tarantino made a picture featuring several key characters travelling by stagecoach before ending up trapped in a confined space where distrust and paranoia begin to run wild, he would be asked if he was – intentionally or otherwise – channelling the spirit of John Ford’s 1939 classic of the same name, which gave Wayne his first major breakthrough as a leading man.
“I actually do love that film, although I’m not on the record for being a big John Ford fan,” he told Film Ink. “But I do think that a case can be made that Stagecoach was a big jump forward in modern filmmaking; it holds up beautifully today. I don’t really think that many directors of that time period would appreciate my movies.”
Tarantino may not be a massive fan of Ford or his greatest collaborator, but he’s enough of a studious cinephile to appreciate the legendary partnership, which was capable of creating magic together. Several of the movies they made together are firmly embedded among the most influential ever made, and while he’s not one to salute The Searchers like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg or bow down at the feet of Rio Bravo like John Carpenter, Stagecoach is hardly a ludicrous shout.
He’s always been an Eastwood guy, first and foremost, but Tarantino’s appreciation and voracious appetite for devouring as many movies as possible has no doubt exposed him to the majority of Ford and Wayne’s back catalogue, whether it’s together or separately. It might not be the consensus pick for the best thing ‘The Duke’ ever made, but most people who’d speak out in disagreement don’t have to Academy Awards like Tarantino does.
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