Dickens has London, Raymond Chandler’s knight-errant detective works out of Los Angeles, and Anne Tyler’s moody introverts haunt Baltimore. John Ford’s greatest Westerns purportedly took place all over the Southwest, but they were all filmed in one place. Like Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre, Ford used one mythic setting for his stage. Tucked into the continental crease where southeast Utah rubs shoulders with northwest Arizona, Monument Valley is one of America’s most dramatic and remote locales. Its sandstone buttes and mesas soar like cathedral spires into the vacant desert sky. It was ninety miles from the nearest paved road and reputed to be the farthest point in the continental United States from a railroad line. There was nothing cheap about this kind of location work. Film crews had to cart in their own generators, gasoline, groceries, and water tanks. But Ford was keen. He believed that Westerns filmed on a soundstage or in the near suburbs of Hollywood looked drab and artificial.
