The Tall Men

An unpretentious but masterly trail-drive epic, one of the purest and simplest examples of the effortless professionalism of Walsh and his collaborators (including co-writer Frank Nugent, John Ford's son-in-law and writer-in-chief), and almost incidentally a sustained exploration of the Western landscape and the place of the stock characters within it. Gable pushes the herd and his own horizons westward through disaster and peril; though the film is probably best remembered by some for Jane Russell's bath scene, frontier-style.