IT'S ONLY THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE!!! Real gunshot sounds (without the fake ricochet sounds dubbed in), with the report echoing off in the distance!!! No singing cowboys, wearing white hats (that never fall off)!!! No liberal Hollywood bias, with the obligatory blacks, Asians and homosexuals thrown in (just to "give it a more balanced appeal to today's moviegoers!!!).
To me, John Ford and John Wayne reached the zenith of their careers when they made this movie. I have seen it many times and I never get tired of watching it. Several years ago, there was a limited release that showed the movie in theater for a couple of nights. I told a friend about it and we decided to go see it as it was meant to be seen...in a theater!!! He brought his girlfriend at the time. She was a very successful career woman, whom I thought would be bored at the least by this movie (if not outright hostile to it). She was RAVING about the movie by the time we left the theater!!! She said she wished she had brought her teen aged children to see it!!
It is like a classic painting that moves! With the backdrop of Monument Valley (as the canvas) and the beautiful color film used (as the paint), John Ford is the master painter. It is, to put it quite simply visually stunning in capturing the vibrant beauty of the desolate western landscape, and this just lends itself to the story of an iron willed loner, who won't quit, won't give up...(Of the Indians they are searching for, who kidnapped Ethan Edwards' niece, he says), "Seems like he never learns there's such thing as a critter (that)'ll just keep comin'. So I promise you, we'll find her in the end, just as sure as the turnin' of the Earth." He says this as snow is falling and they are having to turn back temporarily because they can't track them with snow blanketing the ground, and then he backs his horse out of camera.
There are so many scenes like that in this entire movie, scenes that resonate with me and apparently with a lot of other people as well. Maybe it's because I know that our ancestors had to be iron willed loners, or they would never have braved the trek across the ocean to America from Ireland, or made the journey across the frontier wilderness to seek a better life for themselves and their children.
We are the beneficiaries of their sacrifices and we are pissing it all away as fast as we can (but that's another story)...God help us!!!
I see I'm rambling on again. Oh, by the way the first and second runners up for the greatest movies ever made, are "High Noon" and "Shane," followed up by "The Adventures of Robin Hood", with Errol Flynn (HE WAS ROBIN HOOD!!!), and of course we can't leave out "Red River" now can we??? Tom Dunson and Ethan Edwards (both played by John Wayne) are a lot alike and they both remind me of my Dad!