“...a wild and reckless western capable of separating the sheepish from the cultish. Fuller...deliberately fashioned a cinema of spectacle just before the cinema of quotes so that bits and pieces of this movie would crop up in the New Wave, most prominently in the newspaper-as-iris in Breathless. The story of (Barry) Sullivan's gunman who tames (Barbara) Stanwyck's land baroness despite her ready whip and forty hired guns has thematic similarities to the passing of the West in John Ford's films like My Darling Clementine, but Fuller's treatment, especially his bold use of montage close-ups in showdowns, is almost prophetic of Sergio Leone's Renaissance westerns (see August 9). Ford loved horses in motion too, but he wouldn't withhold a story explanation of forty hard-riding enforcers until the last reel like Fuller does. The taming of the shrew, including the unorthodox shooting down of the heroine when she is used as a hostage shield by a killer, does not miss a Freudian-phallic trick. Likewise the death of Barry at his wedding and the falling of his black-clad corpse into the white dress of his bride was much admired in the annals of nouvelle vague criticism. Fuller himself has repudiated the last sentimental seconds of the ending, but he certainly got his licks in, especially in such odd period ambience as men gathering in bathhouse tubs. He is to be credited with pulling a great many imaginative switches on the old genre clichés.” Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen, Village Voice, 6/11/85.