Metacritic reviews

With such a strong cast, the film almost turns into an ensemble film instead of a star vehicle for Stewart in his first of many collaborations with Mann. An Archetypal Western with the required cowboys, gunfights and damsels in distress, it has become an all time favourite.

The first of Mann's great Jimmy Stewart cycle -- and one of his best. [30 Apr 2010, p.C3]

The genre's other great star-director team James Stewart and Anthony Mann began a string of five remarkable Westerns with this engrossing, genre-reviving chronicle of a stolen rifle and its fateful role in the lives of its possessors. [26 Oct 2003]

Strikingly photographed in black & white, the film is directed with an eye to realistic detail, an ear for the script's frequently natural dialogue and a knack for building suspense.

Played out against breathtaking landscapes that reflect the emotional turmoil of the main characters, Mann's film gives us one of Stewart's greatest performances, his manic intensity evoking both terror and pathos.

Stewart brings real flavor and appeal to the role of Lin, in a lean, concentrated portrayal.

The final shoot-out remains a classic study in mise-en-scene, as Mann transforms a jagged landscape into a highly charged psychological battleground.

This tight, tense black-and-white Anthony Mann film revived Westerns and kept Jimmy Stewart's career alive during the actor's Korean War stint. [19 Apr 1991, p.46]

It is far from the mature outdoor drama that might be brilliantly filmed around a gun. It's just a frisky, fast-moving, funny Western in which a rifle is the apple of a cowboy's eye.

Mann's first film with James Stewart, with whom he was to make a series of classic Westerns, this offers the clearest example of Mann's use of the revenge plot.