The second half took a little sting off my hate for this, but it's still a mediocre offering with offensive caricatures all around. The performances are really stilted, the message is muddled, the narrative is a mess for the first half hour and it doesn't even have Ford's usually stellar visual composition to save it. It seems like Ford is trying to make everyone somewhat sympathetic but instead I found all the characters rather loathsome.

#716

708

Probably my favorite Ford film. I loved Judge Priest, which Ford made 20 years earlier with Will Rogers, but the formal control Ford exercises in this film is outstanding even by his standards. The film includes what to my mind is the greatest sequence in any Ford film, a funeral procession that proceeds largely without dialogue for several minutes, ending with a sermon at the church. The poetry of Ford's cinema is never clearer than in this scene. Beautiful and humane.

# 595

Ford wants us to treat blacks as equals, but paints them in ugly stereotypes, ridiculous caricatures who have no ambition but servitude to their white superiors. I kept waiting for one of them to blurt out "I sho do love me some white folk!". The white characters aren't much better, and tend towards either "annoying" or "bland". And then there's the usual sentimental hooey about God and country. There's a few good scenes, but Ford's predilection for myth-making taints even those.

Really difficult to rate. Could be the strangest film I've ever seen.

737