Though three-strip Technicolor was being utilized by Paramount and sister studios on outdoor subjects it would not be utilized in Westerns until 1939 with the release of Jesse James, although a number of Warner Brothers outdoor films - a tale of a lady lumberjack with God's Country and the Woman (1937) starring George Brent, Gold Is Where You Find It directed by Michael Curtiz and Heart of the North (respectively 1938) were practically Western films. Then two films, Fox's Jesse James and Paramount's DeMille extravaganza Union Pacific (1939) inspired a substantial Western boom; trendy trade paper Variety would note this in early 1939.
Variety had their own reasoning for the resurgence of the genre, and they were mainly cynical in tone, chalking the revival up to being the nature of the business and the copy-cat techniques of the studios; each of them making Westerns for fear of being left out of a forthcoming box-office bonanza. But other factors may have been in play. Variety's report on a 'surge of Americanism' in film subject matter was only to be expected as the European situation worsened dramatically. The key foreign markets were threatened or already lost, and films with powerful domestic appeal made the best sense at the box-office.
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| |Put me in Coach... |
Furthermore, cinema attendance figures in the United States had become static, despite the growing population and studios were in turn making drastic changes in films content in the hope of building new audiences.
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| \Original lobby card for 1939's Union Pacific |
One picture would standalone in the bumper crop of 1939 and that was Stagecoach. This would be John Ford's first Western since Three Bad Men (1926) but was by no means an outstanding commercial success.
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| Learning their wessons well in glorious technicolor |
But the praise of the film, overwhelming, and the the undeniable skill of Ford's astute direction did have a deep influence on fellow filmmakers; it would give the Westerns a chance to be seen as works of gravitas. If the year had not been dominated by Gone With The Wind, the film would have been awarded more Oscars than the two it did.