Which John Ford film did Orson Welles cite as his biggest influence?

The John Ford film Orson Welles cited as his biggest influence was Stagecoach. Released in 1939, this Western followed travelers crossing dangerous Apache territory and helped restore the genre’s prestige in the sound era.

Welles reportedly watched Stagecoach about 40 times while preparing to make Citizen Kane (1941). Ford’s use of deep staging, dramatic landscapes, carefully paced action, and a group of sharply contrasting characters gave Welles a practical model for cinematic storytelling. The film also helped make John Wayne a major star in the role of the Ringo Kid.

Stagecoach was adapted from Ernest Haycox’s 1937 story “The Stage to Lordsburg,” with a screenplay by Dudley Nichols. It was Ford’s first Western filmed in Monument Valley, a landscape that became closely associated with his later work. A common mix-up is naming Citizen Kane: that was Welles’s own film, while Stagecoach was the Ford film he studied so intensely.