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| Released: |
1950 |
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| Genre: |
WESTERN
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
BW |
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| Length: |
86 |
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PRO Reviews
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| PRO | | A good outdoor action film. done in the best John Ford manner. That means careful character development and movement, spiced with high spots of action, good drama and leavening comedy moments. | | | | (Variety) | | Under Ford's leadership... a trip well worth the taking. | | | | (New York Times) | | The nearest any director has come to an avant-garde Western... The feel of the period, the poetry of space and of endeavour, is splendidly communicated. | | | | (Lindsay Anderson, Sight & Sound) | | It can be argued that Wagonmaster is John Ford’s greatest film. Ford does not waste any time over the subtleties of characterization and twists of plot. He strokes boldly across the canvas of the American past as he concentrates on the evocative images of a folk tradition of free adventure and compelling adaptability. There are no moral shadings. His villains are evil incarnate - whining, wheedling and uselessly destructive. The hero destroys them in the end as he would destroy a snake. | | | | (Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist, 1970) | | The emotional quality of Wagonmaster is like that of Rio Grande (1950) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) - very rich in gentle, nostalgic emotion, underscored by comedy, and not disturbed by a disruption in the eventual integration of all emotional elements into the whole. This deceptively unpretentious film is in many ways the high point of Ford's Westerns. Ford's optimism and pessimism are in perfect balance. The darker side of his vision gives an emotional depth lacking in earlier films like Stagecoach (1939) and Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), but the optimism prevails and renders this film essentially undisturbing and only gentle in its nostalgia, not bitter like the later films. | | | | (J.A. Place, The Western Films of John Ford, 1973) | | What emerges at the end is nothing less than a view of life itself, the view of a poet." | | (Patrick Gibbs, 1965) |
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(pictured left), Joanne Dru (pictured right), Harry Carey Jr 
(pictured centre)
