John Ford had avoided the genre for a decade after the silent era, but with Stagecoach he made the first indisputably great sound-era Western. It's a film unlike any of the previous thousand sound Westerns, which had been small-scale B's, remakes of silents, or history-heavy tales of famous frontier figures. John Wayne, stuck in forty B-Westerns through the 1930s, had to face Ford's mockery (“Christ, if you'd learn to act, you'd get better parts”), but the director here crafted Wayne into a star, right from his introductory close-up. Stagecoach is both a breathtaking action film and a tight character study. It melds Depression politics into timeless myth, and turned Monument Valley into the archetypal movie landscape.