“It seems to be a measure of deromanticization to say, ‘well, perhaps Wyatt Earp was just a hustler administering the coup de grace of local politics at the OK Corral, instead of doing it for honor and Clementine.' But there is a deeper romance possible in power itself, and it is this that inspires this remarkable but little-known King Vidor picture (about an immigrant steelworker's rise to wealth and power). The exploitation of the West may be the most operatic expression capitalism has ever known: all the land and water waiting to be carved, shaped and harnessed, and all of it ready for the muscle and ingenuity of hitherto landless immigrants. There is a passion waiting in the ground, and you can see it still in Hoover Dam, the dusty mineheads gnawing wealth out of the ground or the diggers remorselessly making graves for the new frontiersmen.
“An American Romance was made in the spirit of populism from Our Daily Bread and with the yeasty elitism of The Fountainhead, and as in those films the earth and its elements yield to man's dynamic designs. Vidor had no equal at bringing energy to bear on the screen. He may be the most authentic maker of nineteenth-century pictures in that he offered a fervor that could have made men and women drag their lives 3,000 miles westwards like crabs with counting-house brains. You thrill here to industry's throb, just as you can't stop beating time in Triumph of the Will.” David Thomson