Sirk's first collaboration with cinematographer Russell Metty is "a little lyrical poem to the American Western past"--a simple, happy story of people who triumph over small-town hypocrisy in a way that the characters of Sirk's next film, All I Desire, can never do. Sterling Hayden is a lumberman and part-time preacher in a backwoods Oregon town, a widower with three sons who present him with a potential wife in the form of Ann Sheridan, "a girl with a past." Andrew Sarris writes, "Take Me to Town...is so gracefully directed that it transcends its sentimental not-so-wild-West material with a stylistic meditation on theatre and reality worthy of Renoir. Ann Sheridan is warm and womanly in her post-oomph-girl period, and Sterling Hayden is strong, upright and manly.... Sirk, much like Fassbinder, has revealed the beauties and eternal truths lurking behind apparent banalities. He has done this through stylistic transfiguration in a medium in which criticism still lags far behind creation."