I'm not yet through all of the supplements on Criterion's forthcoming (25 May) Blu-ray of Stagecoach (pre-order from Amazon here), but this morning I watched the feature all the way through along with some of the shorter stuff.
This is not a screengrab (Stagecoach is a 1.37:1 movie).
Everything looks better than ever, from the iconic fast-dolly shot entrance of John Wayne to stuntman Yakima Canutt jumping from horse to horse to horse in the attack scene to the quiet, dark final shootout. The transfer is the cleanest I've seen on this film. The movie has never come remotely close to looking this good. The best master was copied to death, and it showed in all the previous home video versions.
I'm pretty sure the first time I saw Stagecoach was on Turner Classic Movies. It was dark, scratched-up, and dirty. At some point I got a roughed-up VHS in college that looked no better. It's since been lost, stolen, or smashed by former roommates with aggression and violence issues (most of my VHS tapes died in a drunken smash-fest one weekend for no good reason). Unfortunately, I loaned out my copy of the previous DVD edition, so I'm going on memory that what stuck out most distinctly different to me was the more consistent and even contrast and light levels.
The dolly shot of Wayne is still blown out, but that's how it looked originally (shot over-lit on a soundstage). There are still some frames that feature some damage, but without inventing missing data, there's nothing else to be done. One shot notably features a black mark dead in the center of the frame for a few seconds, but I presume that there were no suitable elements that contained that portion of the picture intact, so Criterion wisely left well enough alone.
Most of Peter Bogdanovich's 15-minute interview on the disc is reserved for his experience as a Ford biographer, but he does (as always) get to Orson Welles toward the end of the chat. I gather this was recorded in the same session as the one he did for Make Way for Tomorrow. Welles ran Stagecoach 39 times before making Citizen Kane, each time asking questions of RKO technicians and crew. The movie is a really excellent textbook for filmmaking of all sorts, especially drama and action, just as Welles said. There are plenty of elements that Welles lifted, from the lit ceilings to some bits where Ford approached Deep Focus techniques, like the long dark hallway scene (you know it if you've seen it).
My full review will hopefully follow late tomorrow [Ed. Note 8:33pm 21 April- Thursday or Friday is more likely due to the sheer amount of ground yet to cover, apologies], but suffice to say that I sincerely hope that Warner Bros. sub-licenses more vintage westerns to Criterion, John Ford's and others. For that matter, I would love to see what the gurus could do with a Blu-ray of Universal's Lonely Are the Brave, since I doubt Uni would ever do one.