Beautifully filmed, including several iconic Western cinema images and, of course, the always photogenic Monument Valley and Natalie Wood. John Wayne does a great job playing a character who is unrelentingly racist and, though his violent racism is the dominant theme of the movie and obviously meant to make him an unsympathetic protagonist, one wonders how evident this was to audiences in the mid-Fifties as opposed to how much it may have boosted Wayne’s status as an American icon in the eyes of those who didn’t realize that the character’s hate-filled racism was supposed to be a bad thing.

The stabs at comic relief using the cartoonish Swedish neighbor and the intellectually challenged Mose Harper wear thin after a while. Occasionally the staging, sets, and costuming are anachronistic; more 1950s Western than 1860s Texas – but the only really, truly jarring anachronism was white-girl-living-with-the-Indians Natalie Wood’s very well applied lipstick.