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 spirit. It is a tragic reflection on the progress of the cinema that modern audiences, unused to the exercise of the poetic sense, expecting only the cruder impact of a conventional plot, gape and are unhappy when Ford rests his Olympian camera on one of these magnificent prospects, as the wagons trundle on their way and a few voices join together in a revivalist hymn or one of the traditional ballads of the West. (p. 333)