Monument men: The good, the bad and the ugly sides of how the Valley has been portrayed in film

As a new documentary launches about the many different ways Monument Valley has been used on screen, Geoffrey Macnab looks at why we can’t watch westerns so innocently any more

Ford shot his first film, ‘Stagecoach’, in Monument Valley in 1939 (Snap/Shutterstock)

There is one very disconcerting sequence in The Taking, Alexandre O Philippe’s new documentary about the history of Monument Valley in film. Philippe shows scenes from old John Wayne westerns in which the landscapes have been digitally scrubbed out. Instead of those craggy, imposing red buttes and mesas on the Arizona-Utah border that audiences know so well from Stagecoach (1939), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956), there is just a blank background. It makes a huge difference. Wayne is still there in the foreground but, without the majestic backdrops, the magic dissipates and the star himself seems diminished. This montage reminds us how crucial Monument Valley was to John Ford’s vision of the west.

Philippe’s film, premiering in the London Film Festival later this month, is at once a homage to the filmmakers who’ve used Monument Valley in such evocative fashion and a searing critique of their cultural insensitivity. This was Navajo territory and yet few of the movies properly delve into the plight of the Native Americans whose land was wrested away from them.

Strangely, the very first movie to shoot in Monument Valley, George Seitz’s The Vanishing American (1925), adapted from a Zane Grey novel of the same name, acknowledged the suffering in the Navajo Nation in a way that many of its successors did not. “In a western state, far from the present haunts of men, lies a stately valley of great monuments of stone,” reads the portentous title sequence. Even in the 1920s, the guilt and bad faith felt by Hollywood about white America’s treatment of the Native Americans was palpable. In the film, the US government subjugates the Navajo people, who are forced to live on a reservation. Bizarrely, the heroic Navajo (Richard Dix in an early example of a white actor playing a Native American) then ends up fighting in the US army in the trenches of the Somme.