Director: John Ford
Year Released: 1962
Rating: 2.0
Leonard Maltin writes how this was panned during its initial release but praised by Ford scholars later on as a classic, though I agree with the original critics. This is filmmaking-by-rote, folks. Not to say that Ford doesn't know his way around a camera - he does, by jove - but this is just a retread of every other Western out there, with little to add to the genre (aside from a little twist at the end) in terms of interesting plot developments or creativity. Everyone's trying to out-act each other; even the typically calm James Stewart gets into it, yelling above everybody, alternating accents between takes (it sways between 'hick-Jimmy' to 'normal-Jimmy'). The townspeople - as they are in every Western - are mostly alcoholic, illiterate, cowardly fools. Lee Marvin chews up every bit of scenery that surrounds him in a garish part as the seedy bad guy - I kept wondering if someone were this awful and despicable (when his name is mentioned, pained expressions form on everyone's faces and they run for the hills) why no one shot the bastard sooner (there are over seventy-five males in the town and Valance travels with only two others). Also, as if I needed to say more, the obligatory 'love triangle' part of the picture, between John Wayne and Stewart over a totally uninteresting, underwritten Vera Miles character is poorly developed - you never feel the chemistry between any of them.
