A very disjointed plot makes this the worst Ford film I've seen so far. It strings together Western clichés with barely any rhyme or reason. Mortal enemies suddenly get along fine, supposedly smart people make very illogical decisions, just so that the next scene can be set up. It's all pretty incoherent. There are some very funny moments, enough of them to call the entire film a comedy, but as a story, it just doesn't work. Stylistically, the most interesting part is the opening shot, framing the story as coming from an author's imagination, inspired by a famous Frederic Remington painting. The transition form a recreation of the painting to the first scene of the film proper is very well done, and it's amazing how well the two shots match, especially when considering that the crew had none of the eletronic gadgets that made such tricks a lot simpler to achieve decades later. There are many very noticeable jumps in the recovered and restored version. I suspected that the print might have come from a heavily censored version, but the contemporary magazine _Exhibitors Herald_ lists relatively few cuts having been made by at least one particular board of censors. In fact, in a short essay which comes with the Blu-ray, film historian Tag Gallagher suspects that more than 20 minutes might be missing from the surviving print, so it's possible that I'm being unfair to the film and that it was more coherent in its original form. Speaking of the _Exhibitors Herald_, its reviews of the film indicate, however, that _Hell Bent_ wasn't very well received by audiences of the day either. They described it as "mechanically constructed" and based upon a "well-worn theme", and concluded that it "does not reach a very high plane of excellence as screen entertainment."