John Ford was known for reinvigorating the genre of the American Western, and it was Stagecoach in particular that started the resuscitation. Part of what makes Ford's films so compelling was his sense of scale, his on-location shooting, and his framing of human events against a vast and magnificent American landscape.
The story goes that for Stagecoach, the location manager was unimpressed with the notion of shooting on location until he saw the photographs, and Ford knew that Monument Valley, with its wide expanses and impressive buttes, would serve as the perfect setting for his film. In an article for Vanity Fair about John Ford and Monument Valley, Buzz Bissinger wrote, "Never before had a Western looked so western, and, by extension, so distinctly American."
Indeed, Ford's treatment of the valley was so iconic that, as Bissinger writes, "Nobody used Monument Valley like Ford did, so much so that the valley became known simply as John Ford Country. There was a little bit of irony in that perhaps, given that Ford wasn’t of the West at all but a native of southern Maine from the environs of Portland." Over the next 25 years, Ford shot seven films in Monument Valley, including Stagecoach, The Searchers, Rio Grande, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and My Darling Clementine.
