John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [34]
“Mr. Ford wanted to know if it would work if Andy Devine drove the coach himself, and I said, ‘No problem. All he’s got to do is hold the reins.’ So we put Duke and Claire and the rest of the principals in the coach, and took the reins, and we did the scene. Mr. Ford said to me after, ‘Thank you for not drowning my actors.’ I told him,
‘That’s what you pay me for.’ ”
Ford still didn’t ease up on Wayne, as John Carradine remembered. “Duke was watching some rushes with Ford, and there was a scene shot against back projection of Andy Devine driving the stagecoach. Ford said to Duke, ‘What do you think of the scene?’ and Duke said, ‘Well, I think it looks phony because the reins are too loose.’
“Ford took Wayne back to the set and said, ‘Now tell Andy what you told me,’ and before Duke could utter a word, Ford went on,
‘Tell him that he looks phony up there driving the stage.’ Duke tried to explain to Andy and he even apologized, but the damage had been done and from then on, there was friction between Andy and Duke.
“I read somewhere that Ford claimed he did it to juice the pair of them up a bit, but I really wonder what was going on inside Ford’s 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 60
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head. After all, Andy’s character was supposed to like Ringo. There wasn’t supposed to be any tension between the characters.”
The unit finally moved back to Hollywood to film in Republic Studio’s Western street, and on soundstages at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio, where a mock-up of the stagecoach was created on a soundstage. Virtually all the scenes requiring dialogue inside and on top of the coach were shot in the studio, where the actors performed in the mock-up of the stagecoach against back projection.
There were also a few interior scenes, which required Wayne to deliver some of his most important dialogue, usually with Claire Trevor, who recalled, “By this time Ford had eased up on Duke and even gave him gentle praise from time to time. I think Duke and I had a chemistry that really came across on film. We liked each other in real life and became great friends, but the on-screen chemistry was all-important. Some people thought we must have been having an affair, but that wasn’t so. Duke liked dark, Latin types, and I was blond. Not his type at all. And he was in love with Josephine.”
When filming was completed, Ford decided he needed to reshoot one single shot. It was the first shot of Wayne in the film in which the camera tracks into a close-up of the Ringo Kid, swinging and cocking his Winchester and yelling, “Hold it!”
Claire Trevor said, “Ford told me he decided to reshoot Duke’s opening shot because by then, after all the punishment he’d put Wayne through, Duke had exactly the look of pain with the innocence underneath which would establish the Ringo Kid.”
Whether or not Ford did actually refilm Wayne’s opening shot is a question nobody has been able to answer for me. In one way it is a superb entrance for Wayne into the film, with the camera tracking into a close-up of him. But the shot is flawed. For one thing, it would have looked much better had it been filmed on location in Monument Valley, but it was filmed in the studio. It therefore lacks realism, which is probably why the tracking shot is intercut with a location shot of the stagecoach, to make it seem as though it were filmed at the same time. It is also technically weak because the camera goes out of focus. It would seem to make sense that if Ford had gone to the trouble of refilming that moment, 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 61
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he would have done it again after viewing the rushes. After all, to refilm one actor against a projected background was not expensive to do.
Stagecoach was not supposed to turn Wayne into a major star.
“Ford had never intended that the Ringo Kid establish Wayne as a box-office draw,” said John Carradine. “The film had an ensemble cast