Wagonmaster is the nearest any director has come to an avant-garde Western. To use this word of a film by Ford may sound strange; take it, though, not as implying an experiment in any new -ism, but in the sense in which it is perhaps more frequently used, of an absolute, self-delighting liberty on the artist's part…. Ford's handling of [the plot] shows clearly enough that his interest is aroused less by those which propel and shape the narrative (these are apt to be perfunctory) than by the characters and events which give colour to his favourite themes; the dogged persistence of his heroes, the moral beauty of their lives of enterprise and creation. Unconcerned with novelty, he is quite content to draw, for incident and characterisation, on his earlier films…. In Wagonmaster Ford has composed, with the simplicity of greatness, another of his poems to the pioneering...