sh*t for the most part

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"then john wayne offs a handful of natives, beats up a kid, and shoots a mexican within the first hour"

You're joking, right?

John Wayne deosn't off a handful of natives; the natives come looking to kill him & Walter Brennan for no reason after they wipe out the wagon train. What are they supposed to do, not fight back?

He doesn't beat up a kid; the kid pulls a gun on Wayne and Wayne slaps him once.

The mexican went for his gun first and clearly meant to kill Wayne. Again, is self-defense not permitted anymore?

If there was anything questionable about this movie it was the sudden, unbelievable character change of Wayne at the end.

I would not call it dated, though you touch on some things that are worth debating.

I think you'd have to admit that it's Wayne's best performance to date, and possibly ever. And the sense of dread Clift and the others felt, with Tom Dunston hot on their trail comes off very well.

I think the ending sucked. It would have been much better if Clift shot him, and said, "Let's bury him. I'll read over him in the morning."

The use of " IMO " indicates that you're probably about 18, give or take a year. So I ask, what would you know about classic film? Your subject line indicates that you're also kind of crude.

please don't feed the trolls, like the OP idiot.

Even though I loved the movie for all the obvious reasons, I agree that the start (and some of the other scenes, particularly with Joanne Dru) was very cheesy -- a lot of unrealistic scenes and fortune-cookie pompous philosophies. I don't know how two men and a boy could survive alone in a vast wilderness against Indians and Mexican marauders, and how two cattle could grow to a 10,000-cattle herd in 14 years. Two of the many cheesy scenes in the start of the movie:
¶ John Wayne finds his girl's bracelet on the Indian he just killed.
¶ Wayne tells the boy to look at an adversary's eyes to know when he was about to draw a gun.
My eyes rolled throughout the start of the movie.

No, I think it's great for the most part, but has one of the very worst endings of any movie I can remember, and one of the most idiotic and irritating love interests this side of Twilight. Seriously, that woman turns one of the best Westerns ever made into a complete joke in the last half hour. At first, I was prepared to take the arrow-to-the-shoulder scene as a surreal reminder of the dangers of frontier life and the inherent insanity it threatens (it even reminded me of Herzog's Aguirre), but later it became clear that Hawks intended it as a particularly awful meet-cute. It was absolutely embarrassing.

And yet, it was the 40s, so I'm inclined to forgive it that disastrous final act, on account of that creep Hays and his idiotic production code. The rest of the film is so epic and visually accomplished (as well as featuring one of John Wayne's two best performances), that it'd be disingenuous to give it less than 8. But wow. That ending really stinks.

Edit: Lol, having said that, I just reduced my rating to 7. That ending simply cannot go unpunished.

Clearly, the OP's opinion is in the minority. Perhaps he should just stick to Zombie and Raider movies. Oh, and reading his opinion is "still not worth the time IMO"!