Wagon Master (1950)

"We've passed through here once. Remember? You said that tower over there looked like...a Cathedral in Santa Fe." A work so relaxed that Ford can halt narrative to linger, study & make dominant the simple movement of things. A poem of communities, circles, horses. …

Neil Bahadur

98 Untamed poetry. To preserve the natural world is to respect everyone. My favorite Ford.

SilentDawn

The most poetic Ford I've yet seen (and that's saying something). The American myth as repeating cycle, sailing Pilgrims now trekking Mormons. In place of narrative, good-naturedness wrestles with self-righteousness, a desire for peace with the inevitability of violence,…

Jake Cole

I’ve been replaying RDR2 for hours on end recently, so I thought I'd return to a favourite Western: this is literally filled with so many of the best images ever constructed - the rhythmic dissolves are otherworldly. An untamed grace unlike any other. My favourite Ford.

Sethsreviews

But Hell ain't cussin', it's geography... It's the name of a place. A lot of talk about Ford’s incomparable ability to deify the trials & tribulations of pilgrimage (rightfully so!) and not enough talk about how he never loses his sense of humor.

Joe A

you could quite literally pause this at any given moment and have a frame worth admiring in awe. With each Ford I watch now, it's clearer to me why he's considered one of the major visual geniuses. I've never seen a man able to capture seemingly infinite country horizons so…

Sethsreviews

The avant-garde poetry of what may be Ford's greatest film - almost impervious to analysis, a film stripped down entirely to 'grace notes.' Quite the achievement for a film that depicts all life as a struggle! But in that struggle there is only one option - move forward. …

Neil Bahadur

One filmmaker repeatedly attempted nothing less than to encapsulate the motley nature of America and Her People, and that filmmaker was John Ford.

Will Sloan

The short sequence of Ben Johnson galloping away from a small band of Navajo is the most exciting single horse race I've ever seen on film. Johnson was a stuntman, a real-life rodeo champion. His horse runs fast.

Sean Gilman