Wagon Master (1950) by John Ford
“I made twelve or fourteen pictures for him [John Ford], and the happiest I’ve ever seen him on a film was Wagon Master.” -Harry Carey Jr. interviewed by Lindsay Anderson
John Ford’s Wagon Master is quintessential Ford yet often feels sidelined in the broader discussion of his oeuvre. It is not a film mounted in structure but closer to a tone poem; campfire tall tales and legends set to song. Why this film lived in relative anonymity for years was partially due to it being released the same year as Rio Grande, that along with Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon were part of the ‘Cavalry Trilogy’. It also had a limited release by RKO that ultimately cemented the film’s fate as a money loser. Yet, part of the film’s enduring appeal and since rehabilitated legacy among Ford admirers like filmmakers Lindsay Anderson and Peter Bogdanovich is that it is so unpretentious and unostentatious in contrast from the other films of the genre, including Ford’s own work. The great critic Dennis Lim would call Wagon Master, “The last gasp of the classical western,” and “... the pinnacle of the genre’s optimistic ideals.” There is something appealing about Wagon Master, even if not consciously intended, as a film that goes against the currents of the genre’s shifting focuses and conventions.
Wagon Master is ultimately a film about community and forging bonds for survival. It is about a rag-tag group of earnest, God-fearing Mormons, medicine show hucksters, and horse traders trying to make it to the San Juan River portion of Utah who run into trouble with a ‘family’ of robbers known as the Cleggs. It echoes Stagecoach in its strange bedfellows collective, but Wagon Master contains no pull-in close up of a cowboy that made John Wayne into an American icon as it happened in Stagecoach. The film, nonetheless, has many of Ford regulars such as Harry Carey Jr, Ben Johnson, Joanne Dru, Jane Darwell, and Ward Bond (Dru, Carey, and Johnson acted together the year before in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon). There was also the notable performance of Charles Kemper, who played the film’s central villain, ‘Uncle’ Shiloh Clegg, who passed from injuries sustained in a 1950 car accident a month after the film was released. Kemper’s filmography is laced with work for European expats in Hollywood such as Jacques Tourneur, Jean Renoir, and Fritz Lang, but Wagon Master should have been his breakout. His folksy, cherubic gruffness of a man who is, nonetheless, a brute is quite reminiscent of Burl Ives and Charles Laughton. Had he not passed, and Kemper was able to build from this villainous turn, perhaps the legacy of Wagon Master would have been a more pressing topic within American film culture.
Wagon Master does not so much subvert the individual Western hero as the approximation of the Western film, which Ford is largely credited with mythologizing and popularizing. Ford was open about the economic realities and tight budget he was given to make this film which essentially allowed him to lean into the bare essentials and essence of the West. Ultimately, in the end, Wagon Master was a John Ford film to its very core. It has everything you want and expect from a Ford film minus the variation of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, or Henry Fonda in a cowboy hat. What the film lacks in classic Hollywood star power ultimately allows the film to become the ensemble piece that it much better served as in terms of presenting a mosaic of Western life. Even real-life American hero, Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, has a notable role as a Navajo chief (though Thorpe in real-life was born into Sac & Fox Nation) who speaks to Ben Johnson in the language. That exchange is especially noteworthy in presenting how non-discordant the relations are between the Mormons and Navajo people in the film, especially when weighing Ford’s complicated reputation and legacy on the topic.
Despite the lack of instant visual iconography viewers can immediately see in The Searchers, Stagecoach, or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (another RKO picture for Ford made a year before in bewitching technicolor versus Wagon Master’s black-and-white), the majesty of the Utah-set landscapes and silhouettes of wagons and horseback. The film is about myth and how this film’s scenario encompasses the story of America itself. Where it lacks in dynamic dialogue the film’s music underscores the film’s optimism and mood. The then-popular country and western group, The Sons of the Pioneers, begin the film singing the spirited “Wagons West”, and ultimately as the film’s Greek chorus for the rest of the film with other songs. Music is also elemental for communities struck within the film, with Mormon hymns, fiddle playing at bonfire dances, and Navajo Pow-Wows becoming as crucial as scenes of the gunfights and travels.
It then becomes of little surprise that there is something not static, but rather, continuous about Wagon Master in the fact there is no real official ending of the film. Instead, Ford closes on a montage of our characters still traveling along, even a moment of Ward Bond and Harry Carey sharing a tune, as The Sons of Pioneers sing the finale. The film is a love letter to the West but also the bonds struck among the people who braved those travels along the way.
-Caden Mark Gardner
Caden Mark Gardner is a freelance film critic from Upstate New York. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: An Examination of Trans Film Images in Cinema.
But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century available now