The Movie Era: Sixty Westerns in the Red Rocks

For half a century, Hollywood came to Sedona to shoot the West. From the nineteen twenties into the nineteen seventies, more than sixty films were made against these red rocks, so many that the buttes doubled for Texas, for California, even for the Canadian border. The connection began with the novelist Zane Grey, whose story Call of the Canyon, set in Oak Creek Canyon, reached the screen in the early nineteen twenties.

The golden age followed. John Wayne came in nineteen forty-six to make Angel and the Badman. In nineteen fifty the director Delmer Daves shot Broken Arrow here, with James Stewart as the frontiersman Tom Jeffords and Jeff Chandler as the Apache leader Cochise, a film praised for treating Native characters with rare dignity.

Daves loved these rocks and returned to make The Last Wagon and Three Ten to Yuma. Joan Crawford brought her strange, operatic Western Johnny Guitar to Sedona in nineteen fifty-four, and Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda filmed the comedy The Rounders here in the mid nineteen sixties. You can trace this whole cinematic history at the Sedona Heritage Museum, where an exhibit remembers the decades when the town was Hollywood's favorite backdrop.