…the transfer of “gangster” imagery to the West follows the pattern set in Dodge City of borrowing appealing elements from an older genre to aggrandize a Western. But the consequences of the mixture are different in the two cases. ..the basic premise of the gangster film had been to question the easy equation of material and moral progress and to see corruption as the necessary adjunct of America’s rise to the economic heights. Shifting the setting of the social critique from the modern city to the Old West “softens” the critique by setting its objectives at a distance. But at the same time it widens the scope of the critique to include mainstream industries and businesses whose “progressive” and respectable character the gangster film never challenged. And it deepens the critique by locating the source of modern problems , not in the aberration of Prohibition, the intrusion of immigrants, or the innovations of the modern city, but in the very scene that Turner and Roosevelt identified as the site of America’s exceptional genesis—the nineteenth-century agrarian frontier. ..juxtaposing the referents of the gangster film with those of the Western epic [in films like Jesse James and The Oklahoma Kid]…was effectively questioning the fundamental assumptions of the “renaissance” Western.

Slotkin on the “the cult of the outlaw” (Gunfighter Nation, 295)

The basic ingredients of the film are recognizable variations on standard “B” Western formulas. The most patent of these is the spectacular stagecoach-and-Indian chase scene with cavalry riding to the rescue…The main plot is a variation of the classic “good-badman” formula. The hero (Ringo Kid), who has been framed for a killing, escapes from prison to seek revenge and on the way meets “the girl” who will redeem him through love. ..The supporting characters likewise represent common “B” Western types—the apparently respectable banker who turns out to be a crook, an eastern lady out west who needs the aid of a gallant stranger, the comic drunk, the rough-mannered frontier doctor, the effete eastern drummer, the southern gentleman too much on his dignity, the murderous gambler, the sheriff who sympathizes with his prisoner, the “rube,” the whore with the heart of gold.

Slotkin on the “apotheosis of the B Western” in Stagecoach (Gunfighter Nation, 304)

In Stagecoach Ford uses the language of the Western as a tool of inquiry and analysis, exploring and questioning the fundamental assumptions about American communities that underlie self-congratulatory formulas of the epic Western and the history textbook. The little society of the stagecoach is both a microcosm of American society and the model of an ideal alternative to that society’s normal patterns of human relations. The stagecoach community is democratic without being indecisive; familial without the dangerous passions and tribalism that attend the ties of blood; purposeful and coherent without being authoritarian. It is neither mob, nor tribe, nor regiment, though it borrows the virtues from each of these orders.

But the historical status of the stagecoach utopia is problematic, because it does not describe any specifiable “stage” on the continuum of the progressive historical scenario. In the historical epic, the achievement of the heroic quest would have been presented as a metaphor for the triumph of modern America over its youthful poverty, wildness, or moral disarray; and while the journey goes forward, the possibility exists that the stagecoach might constitute a model of some future America at which we will “arrive.” But this possibility is utterly undone when we get to Lordsburg…[which is] merely the perfection of Tonto’s hypocrisies and incipient corruption.

Thus Stagecoach completes its ironic commentary on the progressive Myth of the Frontier. The “progress” achieved through the journey-ordeal belongs only to the isolated individual—it has no social realization, finds no historical home. Democracy, equality, responsibility, and solidarity are achieved—are visible—only in transit, only in pursuit of the goal. When the goal is reached they dissolve, and society lapses into habitual injustice, inequality, alienation, and hierarchy. Our only hope is to project a further frontier, a mythic space outside American space and American history, for the original possibilities of our Frontier have [been] used up.

Slotkin on the fate of the “progressive myth” in Stagecoach ( Gunfighter Nation, 309, 311)