We thought it was going to be ok, but it is very good, great direction and performances.

Dreadfully long piece of unapologetic, sentimental propaganda. Hawks spends the entire first hour introducing York, first as a brash youngster quick to a-drinkin' and a-fightin' (never mind that Cooper was 40) and then as a devout churchgoer. We spend 55 minutes watching him trying to buy some land, then spend 5 minutes on a single-scene conversion that provides the fulcrum for the entire second half of the movie. The war scenes aren't much better, with some out-of-place comic relief from "Pusher", but it would all be fine, for me, if not for the mawkish and didactic morality at the heart of the film.