John Ford: at war and out West once again

When Wayne arrives on screen, slightly under 19 minutes into “Stagecoach,’’ he’s nothing more than the second-billed actor (Claire Trevor was first) in a cast with no marquee names. In fact, Andy Devine — he of the braying voice and swaying gut — got paid $10,000 for playing the stagecoach driver; Wayne, as the Ringo Kid, got all of $3,700. One six-second close-up later, and things would never be the same. John Ford, the movie’s director, saw to that.

That close-up is only the most striking instance of the many ways Ford made a movie that’s such a model of efficient storytelling it became a part of Hollywood’s genetic code as few others have. Orson Welles claimed to have screened “Stagecoach’’ 40 times as preparation for making “Citizen Kane.’’ Seeking to crack (and then recombine) the DNA of American film, Welles knew just where to look.

Tuesday the Criterion Collection reissues “Stagecoach’’ on DVD and Blu-ray in a special-edition two-disc set. Features include a 1917 Ford silent, “Bucking Broadway,’’ a video appreciation from Peter Bogdanovich, a tribute to legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, and the complete text of Ernest Haycox’s short story, “Stage to Lordsburg,’’ which inspired the film. Best of all is the image quality. The digital transfer comes from a 1942 duplicate negative (the original negative has long been believed lost), which isn’t perfect but of consistently high quality.

Of course, the most impressive feature is “Stagecoach’’ itself. Ford’s first non-silent western, it includes so many aspects of the genre he hardly needed to make another western again. It’s astonishing how much Ford managed to pack into 96 minutes: a fallen woman, a whiskey-soaked doctor, a brave sheriff, a slippery gambler, a good-guy outlaw, cavalry, a birth, a romance, some comedy, an Indian attack, a saloon or two, a gunfight, even a (brief) musical number. “Stagecoach’’ also introduces Monument Valley to the screen. Ford wasn’t just altering moviemaking. No less than his near-contemporary, Ansel Adams, he was altering America’s imaginative landscape.

As the next four decades would demonstrate, Wayne was as monumental onscreen as any of those buttes in Monument Valley. Ford unveils that monumentality with a series of wondrously simple effects. They’re the equivalent of a sculptor carving a niche and pediment for a statue.

The preparation begins with a cut, from the stagecoach traveling away from the viewer to one of it traveling toward the viewer. With the cut, the music changes: brightening in melody and speeding up in tempo. Something’s going on here. Then an unseen rifle fires — a kind of ballistic fanfare.

As if all that’s not enough to get viewers’ attention, Ford now grabs them by the visual lapels by violating one of the strictest conventions in film grammar. He breaks the 180-degree rule. This is the practice whereby characters maintain the same left-right relationship on the screen. Ford breaks the rule by cutting to the stagecoach’s cavalry escort heading in the opposite direction from the stagecoach. Something is definitely going on here.

Finally, having set up so much visual and aural tension, Ford resolves it — and with an irresistible flourish. Not only do we get a close-up of Wayne, but it’s a close-up of him spinning his Winchester (as much as the camera feasts on beauty, it feasts on motion even more) — and, the clincher, the close-up is a zoom. (One other touch? Wayne is shot in the studio, the stagecoach and cavalry on location — lending him a further subtle differentiation.) Treatment like that could have made a star out of Andy Devine. Well, almost.

There’s no small irony in this being such a famous shot, since the close-up was Ford’s least characteristic way to use the camera. Part of the greatness of “Stagecoach’’ — and this is one aspect of the movie Hollywood did not absorb — is its being an ensemble. Community is the great good thing in Ford’s movie. It can be the family, as in “The Grapes of Wrath’’ or “How Green Was My Valley’’; the freighter crew in “The Long Voyage Home’’; the Irish village in “The Quiet Man’’; the tribe in “Cheyenne Autumn’’; or the passengers in “Stagecoach.’’

The recurring example throughout Ford’s work is the military unit. That comes through in Ford at War, which starts this Saturday and runs through June 4 at the Harvard Film Archive. It’s the third, and concluding, part of the HFA’s five-month-long Ford retrospective. The series offers documentaries (“December 7th,’’ “The Battle of Midway,’’ and “This Is Korea!’’), as well as features. The latter include “The Long Gray Line,’’ about West Point; “When Willie Comes Marching Home,’’ about the home front in World War II; and one of Ford’s finest and most understated films, “They Were Expendable.’’

Wayne, as a PT boat officer, is again second billed, this time to Robert Montgomery. Headstrong and belligerent, Wayne wants to buck the chain of command and fight. Everything in Hollywood’s emotional grammar sets him up as the hero — except that Ford, who served in the Navy during the war (and was hit by shrapnel while filming the Japanese attack on Midway Island), makes sure we recognize Montgomery’s calm, by-the-book skipper as the moral center of the movie. Montgomery understands that the successful conduct of war relies on the individual deferring to the group.

This sense of community as supreme value — both military and civilian — very much comes through in “The Lost Patrol,’’ which along with “Rio Grande’’ begins the series. The 1934 film follows an embattled group of British soldiers in the Mesopotamian desert during World War I. They’re under the command of Victor McLaglen’s sergeant. His devotion to his men saves him (just as McLaglen’s isolation dooms his character, a year later, in his most famous role, in Ford’s “The Informer’’). Conversely, the religious mania of his fellow soldier Boris Karloff places Karloff outside the group and leads to his downfall. Between those two extremes is the film’s most eloquent image: the dead soldiers’ swords grouped upright in the sand, standing together in death no less than in life.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.