Overrated

One of my all time favorites.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I was in middle school when I saw this in the theatre. It was panned in the press then and it's not much better now. Makes me want to see the 1939 original.

Just a couple of observations. Pausing the film before the last big fight with the Indians chasing the stagecoach, I counted 25 Indians on horseback. During the fight, there were 41 shot off their horses. Hummm? The director must think horses lope (run) everywhere? It's a good thing they were making a movie and the horses got breaks along with the actors or they would have keeled over dead from all that running. When a gun is fired, it recoils or jumps back. Here they pretty much stay still. And guns are LOUD. Yet no one ever flinches or even reacts to the noise. Shots inside that stagecoach would be deafening. Firearms only hold a given number of bullets yet the guns in this movie never seem to run out. Firearm accuracy! I've shot a lot and even hitting a still target it hard but these movie cowboys must be the world's most accurate shooters, hitting Indians on running horses and shooting from a fast moving stagecoach. Pretty impressive! And lastly, if they had to have a floozy in the movie, I'm glad they picked Ann Margaret 'cause she had to be the hottest dance hall girl in the old west. Probably not many looked like that. Just sayin'.

Many people question why this and other films that we think are great are remade. I don't know about many others, but I did hear about why this one may have been remade.Before there was Cable TV and Movie Classic Channels people like me were at the mercy of TV programmers. We could look through TV Guides or newspapers and hope to find a certain movie would be on and then maybe it was showing at a time we would actually be around to watch it. Didn't have VCR's back then either.Then there were movies that weren't available for TV. Sometimes the powers that be wouldn't allow the movie to be shown on TV because they didn't approve commercials interrupting the director's vision. Sometimes there was other reasons that they weren't available for TV.I heard that the 1939 version of Stagecoach was one these movies. I can't find anything about this online, but I seem to remember hearing it. I do know that I didn't see the 1939 version till sometime in the 1990's. I see it was re-released in 1996.So, if people were deprived of seeing the original, then I can see why a remake was done and they didn't do a bad job either. I had put off seeing the 1966 version simply because the original is readily available and played frequently on TV here. I got to see it today and it in no way comes close to the original, but it isn't anything that anyone connected to it need be embarrassed about.As for other classics being remade in this day and age when the originals are easily available, well, Don't even get me started on that tangent, makes me want to pick up my Winchester and ride the Stagecoach into Indian Territory!

Poorly-written remake of the 1939 John Wayne chestnut has stagecoach full of disparate people encountering personal strife and drama on the treacherous route to Cheyenne. Since the characters are such an obvious lot (what with a prostitute, a pregnant woman, a bank robber, a wily alcoholic, an outlaw, etc.) and are written and portrayed as caricatures, there's nobody here to care about. Newcomer Alex Cord broods mightily as the outlaw, but this actorly process of cool non-projection is a snooze by now; Ann-Margret, as the saloon girl with the shady life, is only comfortable in her carefully-posed close-ups, her line readings rendered false by a peculiarly twangy accent and no conviction in her behavior (she reverts too easily on being 'lewd' without giving the character any other dimensions). The direction is sloppy, the pacing leaden, and even the Colorado scenery fails to enliven the proceedings. *1/2 from ****