Barry Keith Grant (ed.)
John Ford’s “Stagecoach” (Cambridge Film Handbooks)
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003

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The Cambridge Film Handbooks series is a valuable addition to literature on film studies and cinema history. With each volume comprising half a dozen articles on one classic movie, this series has already yielded fresh insight into Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990). At present, there are only a handful of titles in the series; but these are impressive in terms of both ambitious scope and the overall quality of research.

Barry Keith Grant’s edited collection on Stagecoach is a welcome addition to the Cambridge series. Based on Ernest Haycox’s short story “Stage to Lordsburg”, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) is generally credited with revitalizing the Western, lifting it out of the rut of “B”-features, and ushering in the genre’s golden age, which lasted roughly till America’s Bicentennial in 1976. Ford had churned out dozens of Westerns during the silent era, but Stagecoach was his first foray into the genre since 1926 – and his first since the advent of sound. It was with this movie that Ford introduced Monument Valley as an essential part of America’s mythic landscape – and launched John Wayne on the path to stardom and his eventual status as the greatest of all Western film icons. After Stagecoach, Wayne, Monument Valley and the Western genre would all be inextricably bound up with the art, the films and the mytho-poetic vision of John Ford.

1939 is generally considered by film historians to be Hollywood’s annus mirabilis. That year, the American movie industry’s output was one of unprecedented quality, but there is also considerable significance in the ideological inflections, which underlay some of the most popular films of 1939. In that one year, moviegoers were offered tales of courageous Caucasians battling against dark-skinned infidels in Gunga Din and Beau Geste; celebrations of the American democratic and populist spirit in Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Young Mr Lincoln; hymns to free enterprise (Ninotchka) and the American heartland (The Wizard of Oz); and towering above all, strands of white supremacy, American history, business machinations, affinity to the soil and tempestuous romance all served up in the year’s most spectacular production, Gone With the Wind.

Given the prominence of all of these narrative and ideological ingredients in films of the late 1930s, it was little wonder that the time seemed ripe for the Western to take its place as a major Hollywood genre. Yet 1939 was something of an annus mirabilis for director John Ford, too. That year saw the release not only of Stagecoach but also of his Young Mr. Lincoln and his first movie in Technicolor, the Colonial/Revolutionary era Western Drums Along the Mohawk; and before the year was over, he had completed filming of John Steinbeck’s highly acclaimed novel The Grapes of Wrath. If ever a director enjoyed a halcyon period in which he was unfailingly at the top of his form, it was Ford in 1939. (Incidentally, 1939 was also an annus mirabilis for Thomas Mitchell, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Doc Boone in Stagecoach; his other credits that year included Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, The Hunchback of Notre Dame – and Gone With the Wind).

Orson Welles, though his style and themes were markedly different from Ford’s, claimed Ford had been his cinematic teacher, and that during the making of Citizen Kane (1941) he had screened Stagecoach for his own edification over forty times. Yet what is there still to say about one of the most famous, most revered and, certainly, extensively written-about films in Hollywood history? A range of new books on the Western were published during the latter half of the 1990s, and at least five on Ford have appeared in the last four years alone. One might therefore wonder if there remain any fresh riches to be gleaned by revisiting Stagecoach yet again.

Judging by this new collection, the answer is resoundingly affirmative. Barry Keith Grant starts the ball rolling with a comprehensive introduction which situates Stagecoach in a historical context and emphasizes its importance not merely for the Western genre and Hollywood cinema in general but also for Ford’s œuvre, both Western and non-Western. He examines its influence on the genre, pays due attention to the iconography of both Monument Valley and John Wayne, charts its production history, and scrutinizes the text of Stagecoach, highlighting key themes in the narrative while engaging adeptly with previous analysts of Ford’s filmic world (for example: Janey Place, Tag Gallagher, Andrew Sarris, Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington). The six essays, which follow, are, like the motley passengers on the stagecoach itself, a disparate assemblage, contrasting with yet curiously complementing one another.

In “Stagecoach and Hollywood’s A-Western Renaissance”, Thomas Schatz ably and accurately demonstrates that Stagecoach was by no means single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of the “A”-Western. He points out that “this A-Western resurgence had less to do with the remarkable vitality of the B-Western at the time … than with the currency of other A-class production trends, cycles, and genres, from Technicolor spectacles and ‘outdoor’ pictures to historical costume epics, biopics, swash-bucklers, and Foreign Legion films” (p.20). He also notes that other high-quality “A”-Westerns of 1939 such as Henry King’s Jesse James and Michael Curtiz’s Dodge City had been in production around the same time as Stagecoach and were actually far more representative of big-budget Western films of that era.

Schatz stresses the extent to which, even in 1939, long before the auteurist theory was entertained in American critical circles Stagecoach was perceived primarily as the achievement of its director. He also briefly traces the development of the contemporaneous Warner Bros project Dodge City, a star vehicle for Errol Flynn. Crucial to this was the moulding of Flynn’s star persona and Dodge City to suit Warner’s’ own house style, and implicit here is the assumption that Ford, operating in conjunction with the independent producer Walter Wanger under the auspices of United Artists, enjoyed greater creative freedom than he would have had, had the project been assigned to him by one of the front-rank studios.

Schatz’s article helps to draw attention to several facts crucial to an understanding of Stagecoach’s true historical import. Production of Stagecoach was contemporaneous with that of a handful of Westerns with even more lavish production values (Jesse James for 20^th Century-Fox, Dodge City, and Cecil B DeMille’s Union Pacific for Paramount), thus it was certainly not solely responsible for propelling the genre into the “A”-list category of movie entertainment. Stagecoach was stylistically, thematically and ideologically atypical of the crop of “A”-Westerns that flooded onto American cinema screens between 1939 and 1941, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and American entry into World War II. Yet Schatz foregrounds these observations to clarify the true historical context rather than to denigrate the movie’s legendary status, and he emphatically acknowledges the creative genius was primarily Ford’s. While paying due lip-service to Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif” and Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” as the literary progenitors of Stagecoach, Schatz asserts that “the dominant sources seem to be Ford’s previous films” (page 27), in particular The Lost Patrol (1934) and The Hurricane (1934).

Schatz considers those nation-building epics and biopics, which constituted the bulk of prewar “A”-Western fare, turgid and leaden by comparison: “[Ford] avoided the crude historicism of the other A-Westerns, as well as the flagrant jingoism of the epics and the revamped gangster ethos of the outlaw biopics. Ford thus created in Stagecoach a singular prewar Western with one foot planted in US history and the other in American mythology. This symbiosis of fact and legend is the very essence of the film’s enduring appeal and its tremendous influence on the regenerate A-Western form. Indeed, today Stagecoach looks distinctly modern in its deft amalgam of history and myth, while it’s a-Western counterparts seem sorely dated and heavy-handed” (42).

Anybody who has endured Michael Curtiz’s Virginia City, King Vidor’s Northwest Passage or Henry Hathaway’s Brigham Young – Frontiersman (all 1940) will surely know precisely what Schatz is talking about. Indeed, The Nation’s entire review of another prestigious Western of 1939 read: “Union Pacific (Paramount), directed by Cecil B de Mille [sic], employs every possible and impossible cliché so crudely that it makes one long to see Stagecoach again” (The Nation [New York], June 3 1939, page 654). Two years later, in the New York Times, reviewer Bosley Crowther listed among the virtues of Fritz Lang’s Western Union “a climactic pistol duel quite as suspenseful as the memorable conclusion of Stagecoach” (New York Times, February 7 1941, page 23). These two reviews – one written in condemnation, the other in praise – aptly demonstrate how quickly Stagecoach had become accepted as shorthand for excellence within the Western genre.

In concluding his article, Schatz not only situates Stagecoach in the context of “A”-Westerns made between 1939 and 1941 but, briefly tracing the subsequent development of the Fordian canon, he establishes this film’s significance for the director’s reputation and his own enduring place in history: “The making of that post-war ‘genre auteur’ began with Stagecoach, when Ford’s stature and relative autonomy from the production machinery and executive authority of any one studio gave him the licence to pursue his own singular vision, yet with the resources necessary to realize that vision. And paradoxically, Ford’s autonomy in creating Stagecoach and his own deep roots in the Western enabled him to mine the genre in ways that other A-Western directors simply could not…. Thus the film was a watershed for Ford as well as for the Western genre, a coming of age for both filmmaker and genre and a definitive product of Hollywood’s classical era” (44).

Schatz’s article is the most comprehensive of the six. Yet several of the others, although more narrowly focused, are none the less authoritative for that. Charles J Maland’s “‘Powered by a Ford’?: Dudley Nichols, Authorship, and Cultural Ethos in Stagecoach” does not attempt to deny the centrality of Ford’s creative input; still, by focusing on the particular contribution of screenwriter Dudley Nichols he provides a measured corrective to the predominant interpretation which ascribes authorship to Ford. While this naturally underscores the collaborative process of movie-making, in contrast to the popular conception of the lone genius at the helm, in this instance it is especially apposite.

Through the 1930s, Nichols had been involved in the scripting of no less than eleven John Ford films prior to Stagecoach: Men Without Women and Born Reckless (both 1930), Seas Beneath (1931), Pilgrimage (1933, dialogue only), The Lost Patrol and Judge Priest (both 1934), The Informer and Steamboat Round the Bend (both 1935), Mary of Scotland and The Plough and the Stars (both 1936) and The Hurricane (1937). In addition, he would later be the scriptwriter for Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940) and The Fugitive (1947). Nichols’ collaboration with Ford was regular and close, and Maland demonstrates convincingly that Stagecoach was infused with the screenwriter’s own brand of “Popular Front liberalism” (50) as well as the director’s own mythic vision of the American frontier.

Maland charts the growth of the Popular Front as a bastion against fascism in the latter 1930s. He chronicles Nichols’ pre-screenwriting experience in the Navy and then journalism before arriving in Hollywood, and extensively details the role Nichols played in the Screen Writers Guild’s conflicts with the movie capital’s producers and also his commitment to Popular Front causes such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Both he and John Ford, for example, were members of the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain. Yet Maland draws on previous biographers of Ford to illustrate that the director was not as consistently committed to liberal causes as was Nichols, and following from this he deduces that Stagecoach’s distinctly liberal-New Deal ethos is more attributable to Nichols than to Ford.

Furthermore, Maland examines Haycox’s original story “Stage to Lordsburg” and persuasively argues that what is important, in ideological terms, was not in the short story but, instead, was Nichols’ invention. Here he concentrates specifically on the creation of two new characters: Gatewood (Berton Churchill), the blustering, hypocritical, embezzling banker, a fair-weather patriot, obnoxious isolationist and scoundrel masquerading as a “respectable” citizen – a recognizable bête noire for Americans who had endured the Great Depression; and the sympathetic, cultured, tolerant Doc Boone. Maland declares that “it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly who contributed what” (whether Ford or Nichols) but he advances the thesis that “in reshaping the short story through his screenplay drafts, particularly by inventing the key characters Doc Boone and the banker Gatewood, Nichols transformed Ernest Haycox’s short story into a Popular Front Western, one that drew on contemporary concerns and conflicts to energize the narrative from the point of view of a Popular Front liberal…. Nichols’s experiences with the SWG and his response to the contemporary political situation in the United States helped shape those creations” (61).

Much of the remainder of Maland’s article is given over to the presence and prominence of Doc Boone and Gatewood. One of the most fascinating aspects of this line of inquiry is Maland’s detailed examination of Nichols’ draft script, and consequently it is something of a surprise to learn Gatewood’s obnoxiousness was actually toned down for the finished film. For example, in one scene, which did not survive in the final cut, Gatewood flung a ladle of water at an Apache wife at a way-station (see page 65). Similarly toned down – at the specific request of Joseph Breen of the Production Code Administration – were several references and jokes pertaining to Doc Boone’s alcoholism. Ford, by no means averse to lifting a glass himself, often incorporated jokey business about tippling on the sly (just think of Victor McLaglen in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) and depending on one’s viewpoint, this low comedy endeared his movies to audiences or was one of the most embarrassing elements of his filmic style.

In any event, Maland notes astutely: “If Gatewood represents the hated economic royalists of the Popular Front era, Doc is the educated but marginalized professional who aligns himself with the common people” (67). Overall, this second piece in the collection is well-researched and impressively presented, so it is rather disappointing that over pages 71 to 73 he repeatedly refers to Gregg Toland’s cinematography; but the cinematographer on Stagecoach was Bert Glennon. On a book dedicated to the study and scrutiny of a single movie, one wouldn’t expect an error as fundamental as this to appear, let alone recur; and surely someone ought to have picked up on it at proof-reading stage.

Leland Poague’s “That Past, This Present: Historicizing John Ford, 1939” is, if anything, a little too ambitious. Poague delves deeply into contemporary reviews to gauge the extent of Ford’s profile in 1939, and to see how often he was cited as the primary creative force behind his three classic movies of that year, Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln and Drums Along the Mohawk. This has entailed scrutiny not only of the nationally circulated “usual suspects”, the New York Times, Time and Life, and the movie trade paper Variety, but also an array of local and regional material gleaned from newspapers published in cities as diverse as Ames, Iowa, St Louis, Missouri and Atlanta, Georgia. Poague examines the racial composition of audiences in these three cities (contrasting the situation in Iowa, where discrimination in movie theatres was prohibited by the State’s legal code, with the reality of segregation in Georgia), respective movie exhibition patterns and, by way of intricate content analysis, press-kit promotions and display ads utilized in these three areas for Ford’s American trilogy of 1939.

Several interesting points come out of this article, among them the fact that a number of earlier Ford films were still in circulation in 1939, such as The Lost Patrol, Judge Priest, The Hurricane, Wee Willie Winkie (1937), Four Men and a Prayer and Submarine Patrol (both 1938). This certainly proves that Ford had made a number of films which continued to be popular well after their initial release; this is, of course, not the same as implying that there was a John Ford cult, or even a general consciousness of Ford among a significant number of moviegoers. Another noteworthy (yet hitherto little recognized) fact is that, within those disparate regions on which Poague has focused his research, a number of other big-budget “A”-Westerns made it into theatres before Stagecoach. Thus, from the perspective of many moviegoers of 1939, Stagecoach did not (as is now commonly assumed) initiate the trend of top quality Westerns but was, instead, part of a cycle that was already underway.

One of the problems of Poague’s article, however, is that it tries to do too much. It is full of wonderful insights, such as his comparisons between Stagecoach and The Informer, and a sustained intertextual reading of Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln and Drums Along the Mohawk, with special attention to the symbolism of fences and the theme of the law pertaining to three recreated moments of America’s past. This comes toward the end of the article – then he reverts to pondering “the relationship between exhibition and reception circumstances” (105). The overall result is uneven – neither broken-backed nor dove-tailed but a flipping back and forth between exhibition and reception on one hand and symbol and theme on the other. One cannot help but feel that there are two excellent articles here, combined into one piece to the detriment of each.

The fourth essay in the collection, J P Telotte’s “‘A Little Bit Savage”: Stagecoach and Racial Representation” addresses the representation of Native Americans in Stagecoach but enlarges its remit to take account of Ford’s depiction of other non-Caucasian races throughout his œuvre. It is true that Ford used certain actors as a “catch-all” representation of a racial “Other” – most notably the African-American Woody Strode, whom he cast as a Black American in Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) but also as a Comanche warrior in Two Rode Together (1961) and as a Chinese warlord in his last film, Seven Women (1966).

It is also true that Ford’s representation of the Native American varied from film to film. Geronimo’s Apaches in Stagecoach are not malevolent in themselves, but rather are just one more hazard of nature the passengers must encounter – and prevail over – on their way through the desert. Granted, Indians were treated without much sympathy in certain Ford Westerns, such as Rio Grande (1950) and Two Rode Together; however, both Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) were both sympathetic to Indians long before the director made his official “apology” in his final Western, the revisionist Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Even the Western generally regarded as Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers (1956) is profoundly ambiguous on the matter of race. Just because its hero is an Indian-hater does not mean the film endorses his ideology; indeed, it is a tragedy about a wrong-headed man, and the film implicitly condemns his racism.

Yet what is at the heart of several later Ford Westerns (The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge and Two Rode Together) is the issue – and, very possibly, the fear – of miscegenation; and among Ford’s sound era Westerns, this first reared its head in Stagecoach, when, during the climactic Indian attack Hatfield (John Carradine) saves his last bullet for the Southern gentlewoman Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt). Telotte contrasts this scene with an ideologically and thematically similar moment from the same year’s Union Pacific. The racial spectre of the “fate worse than death” had a long pedigree in the American cinema, ranging as far back as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Perhaps the most shocking resolution to this puritan-salvationist paranoia occurred in Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid (1972): a cavalryman rides toward a white woman who is about to be captured by Indians; she smiles gratefully, thinking he has returned to rescue her – but he puts a bullet in her head. Behind this disturbing act lies the same rationalization as a famous quote from the Vietnam War when an American commander explained, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” Hatfield aims his gun at Lucy Mallory for precisely that reason.

Gaylyn Studlar’s “‘Be a Proud, Glorified Dreg”: Class, Gender, and Frontier Democracy in Stagecoach” delivers on all three constituents of its subtitle. Stagecoach foregrounded issues of class more explicitly than perhaps any other Western film prior to Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). Studlar engages with Ford’s classic in the context of a Depression-era artefact, taking into consideration the socio-historical theories of Frederick Jackson Turner (especially his acclaimed 1893 essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”) and the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Viewing Stagecoach in relation to nineteenth-century frontier history and literature as well as a contemporary context, Studlar asserts: “my primary interest is in how the film speaks to longstanding social contradictions inscribed in depictions (both fiction and non-fiction) of the frontier. In this respect, Stagecoach is squarely located within longstanding debates regarding the social function of the frontier in US democracy and development” (134).

After a close and extremely intelligent reading of the film, she observes: “The middle- and upper-class easterners (Peacock, Lucy Mallory, Hatfield, Gatewood) are all dispersed: Peacock and Lucy to the hospital, Hatfield to the morgue, Gatewood to jail…. The irrelevancy of the socially ‘superior’ classes to the safe passage of the stagecoach and to the resolution of the main protagonists’ conflicts may be read as Ford’s way of asserting the functional inferiority of the social elite, their lack of vitality and adaptation to Western democracy, and, of course, their ultimate irrelevancy to the primary concerns of the Western as a myth” (152).

This is all well and good – but, personally, I would be inclined to take this argument even further. The fates of the various characters in Stagecoach betoken a very clearly worked-out system of “bottom-up” Social Darwinism. Here, frontier society is akin to a tree, which must of necessity be pruned of all its feeble branches so the reinvigorated corpus might flourish anew. It is almost preordained that the two fundamentally ineffectual characters, Peacock (Donald Meek), the liquor salesman, and Buck (Andy Devine), the coach driver, are wounded; that Hatfield, the ideologically outmoded Southerner, perishes; that Gatewood is arrested; and that the Plummers are killed. There is to be no room for the timid, the unhealthily ancient, the corrupt, or the malignant. However, at picture’s end American society is still depicted as implicitly flawed and fallible – otherwise, why would the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) and Dallas (Claire Trevor) seek their Eden South of the Rio Grande. As Doc Boone famously opines, “They’re saved from the blessings of civilization.”

Accordingly, Studlar concludes that the frontier experience, “whether fictionalised, lived, or theorized, cannot escape the complications of class, gender, or American democracy itself” (154). She’s also far too shrewd an analyst of Ford’s films to suggest that Stagecoach’s class-gender axis (with the prostitute heroine intrinsically nobler than the prissy, frosty Southern gentlewoman) was lastingly representative of Ford’s politics or personal philosophy. Ford was first and foremost an artist, not an ideologue, and as such he was quite capable of subverting his own archetypes for the sake of fresh aesthetic inspiration. He took pleasure in subverting the Madonna/Magdalene dichotomy in Stagecoach, but he reinforced it with a vengeance seven years later in My Darling Clementine (1946).

The sixth and final piece, William Rothman’s “Stagecoach and the Quest for Selfhood”, while good enough in itself, is probably just a little too much in the wake of the other five; for we are back, as we were with Studlar’s article, in consideration of Dallas, and another lengthy analysis of her character. Rothman raises certain controversial points worthy of further debate – for instance, his contention that Dallas, by caring for Lucy instead off running away with Ringo, is “chickening out” rather than being noble. However, Rothman occasionally punctures very valid observations by seeming to present them as widely held perceptions and then, in the midst of the same sentence, admitting they are no more than his own subjective conclusions. Examples: “To contemporary sensibilities – mine for one” (160), and “[Claire Trevor’s]voice is almost always pitched at the edge of hysteria and grates on the ears – at least, my ears – like chalk on a blackboard” (167).

The latter half of this article focuses on an in-depth shot by shot analysis of three key scenes (first boarding the coach in Tonto, the famous dining-table scene at the way-station, and after arriving in Lordsburg) to demonstrate the ways in which Lucy and Dallas are fascinated with one another but fail to connect with each other. Ultimately, Rothman finds these female protagonists wanting in comparison with “the heroines of remarriage comedies and melodramas of the unknown woman” (176) of the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps what he wants is another movie, or at least one by another director. The kind of movies Rothman is alluding to are not the type in which John Ford specialized, and one is reminded of Orson Welles’s comment that Ford was a great poet – but for men, not for women.

When working on The Open University’s new course on Film and Television History, I was assigned to write a unit on American film genres, among them the Western. Part of my responsibility was to select a Western for students to view, analyse and interact with by way of teaching exercises. I chose Stagecoach. Mindful of the fact that many students might have had no previous experience of the Western, I had to pick one which was accessible and which would serve as an ideal introduction to the genre. Stagecoach suited this purpose perfectly. Sixty-four years after its original release, it still looks amazingly fresh – and it crystallizes many of the key themes and issues, which would remain pertinent throughout the golden age of the Western.

To all intents and purposes, that golden age began with John Wayne felling three villains with three bullets, then riding off with his lady love; it ended thirty-seven years later with John Wayne’s last gunfight, against another three villains, in Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976). Over those thirty-seven years, the Hollywood Western chronicled a loss of faith in the promise of American society. Stagecoach, by far the darkest, most pessimistic of the 1939-1941 “A”-Westerns, was almost uncanny in its anticipation of the jaundiced views of American society which infused 1950s classics, for example, Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954). By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the genre was explicitly critical of the corporate barons of ranch, bank and railroad who marginalized Western outlaws all the way into their graves in films such as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and his Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).

Gatewood had been vanquished and punished in Stagecoach. Yet on the American frontier as depicted in Westerns of the 1970s, the Gatewoods had emerged triumphant. The fortunes of the genre declined after the mid-1970s and, despite the presence of former Western star Ronald Reagan in the White House through the 1980s, they did not revive. Thankfully the Western has been spared the indignity of surviving into the era of the Bushes. Barry Keith Grant’s book on Stagecoach is a welcome contribution to an ever-growing body of literature on the director and the genre which each represented the finest of American popular culture – a culture, a genre, an ethos, and in many ways a whole country now lost. Lost and, like Darling Clementine in the song, gone forever.

Michael Coyne is Lecturer in Film and Television History at The Open University.