Overrated?

I thought it was a fascinating character study, and while it's not my favorite Western ever, I won't argue with its rating.
---
Dyin' aint much of a livin', boy.

I didn't really like it either. Not a big fan of pre-60s westerns anyway.

As far as I´m concerned, without a doubt - it´s such a bland and flat and almost apathetic movie delivered by the actors with relative broadness customary for the time. But that´s okay. What is not quite as okay and sort of astonishes is the flat, dry and almost disinterested way the climactic revolver showdown was staged. The cam´ra kept shifting back and forth between smoking barrels stretching out from behind corners and opened windows, but the action was so stilted as to come across almost as some kinda twisted parody. Zero - and I mean absolutely zero - sense of any actual danger is communicated throughout. Just a movie, eh?

I´ve tried to see a few well known classic era westerns as of late, having disliked and largely ignored the genre for years, and it appears I keep coming up more or less empty. I said this before on The Searchers board (a film I consider to be worse than High Noon), but here again: it apparently took the arrival of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah to finally show the true fear, filth and moral rot of the wild west and to tackle the subject matter with some true grit. All classic westerns I keep encountering seem to have this artificial veneer of cleanliness and decency... as well as some truly puffed up, overaccentuated acting performances thrown into the mix that only serve to undermine any true sense of vileness of the circumstance. No offence intended for folks that dig this kinda stuff, but I´ll rate it something like 6,5/10 and be done with it.






"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

[deleted]

I can't really say if it is over-rated. It certainly doesn't standup against othere Westerns that have been excluded out of the IMDb top 250, namely The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, Red River, and Rio Bravo. High Noon holds up, but it is of a lower level than those films listed, in my opinion.
It is also a shame that there seems to be a bias against John Wayne westerns in the IMDb voting block. There are plenty of westerns on the top 250 list, none of which are Wayne westerns. For God's sake, John Ford (the most influential director of westerns ever) only has one film on the list (the dust-bowl drama The Grapes of Wrath)! It is a shame that Wayne's political views often inform the stances people take regarding their quality. Wayne may have come to be a representation of American ignorance, but that is a mis-apropriation. He was a good and thoughtful man, with a supreme and genuine love of country and those who belittle Wayne and his films on the basisi of his politics are no better than the brainless talking heads over at Fox News.

Last Films Seen: Rio Bravo {A+}