John Ford regularly made such clear-eyed, unsentimental assessments of the Old West and the lies that forged its mythology that one may wonder how the concept of a “revisionist western” ever took root when the original was already so bleak.

There's much to say about it; the simplest is that it's both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.

There is a purity to the John Ford style. His composition is classical. He arranges his characters within the frame to reflect power dynamics -- or sometimes to suggest a balance is changing.

Ford’s ultimate statement on the West, mythmaking and masculinity, an unusually soulful western about the creation of legends and the destruction of truth.