It’s difficult to believe that John Wayne wasn’t always a star, but before Stagecoach he and the genre that made him famous, the western, weren’t doing well. He’d had an earlier chance with The Big Trail (1930), but when that was a flop he was primarily relegated to making B westerns. The western itself wasn’t a hot commodity, so when director John Ford pitched the idea for his first sound western to David O. Selznick, the profit-driven producer...
