Stagecoach was the first John Ford Western to be filmed in his beloved Monument Valley. Ford would make some of his greatest films in the majestic countryside, including My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Ford's masterpiece, The Searchers (1956), a TCM Essential. Ford loved the locale, because of its natural beauty and its remote location from Hollywood.

The spectacular stunt performed by Yakima Canutt, where he is dragged underneath the galloping stagecoach, was first pioneered by Canutt in a 1937 B-Western called Riders of the Dawn. The same stunt was later adapted by veteran stunt performer Terry Leonard for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), when Leonard, doubling Harrison Ford, is dragged underneath a moving truck.

John Ford later maintained that Ernest Haycox had gotten the germ of his short story from Guy de Maupassant's Boule de Suif, a tale about an esteemed citizen and a prostitute traveling by coach through France during a time of war.

The image of John Carradine's gloved hand pointing a pistol at Louise Platt's head, a move intended to save her from violation by the marauding Indians, is an homage to a similar shot from D.W. Griffith's The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1914).

In 1966 Gordon Douglas directed a remake of Stagecoach, with Alex Cord and Ann-Margret in the lead roles and Bing Crosby as Doc Boone. It was universally panned by the critics and was not a hit with audiences either.

Orson Welles later claimed to have watched the film dozens of times before directing his own masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941). In fact, during an interview with Playboy Magazine, Welles was asked which American directors were his favorites and he replied, "The old masters.....By which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford."

by Scott McGee & James Steffen