“For years John Ford's claim that The Sun Shines Bright was his best picture was taken with a grain of salt by most film critics and Ford fans. Now it appears that Ford may have been right. On the surface it is a slight, folksy picture about life in a small Kentucky town in the 1890s--an affectionate glance back at Judge Priest (1934) and his other Will Rogers films of the early '30s. But Ford's South is less idyllic than 20 years before, and the story of a prostitute's return home to die, underlaid with the recurring theme of guilt and redemption, give the film a thoughtful tone. Lindsay Anderson was one of the few to recognize the film's greatness at the time of its release; in Sight and Sound, he wrote of the film's climactic funeral scene: ‘This is a magnificent tour de force, with its emotional conviction supported by a sharpness of definition that shows the hand of a storyteller of genius: the ornately caparisoned hearse followed by the single figure of the Judge; the lonely barouche full of prostitutes, half proud, half scared at their own temerity; the raw crunch of wheels on gravel; the shocked and silent bystanders; and, in ones and twos, the generous-hearted ones who have courage above contention, and who step deliberately out into the road to join Judge Priest behind the hearse. It is impossible not to wonder at the way Ford has managed to preserve, so freshly, all these years, this power to move and to delight, this poesie du coeur.'” Treasures from the UCLA Film Archives, a PFA publication