Lightdeossk Captivating movie !

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

marktayloruk The South perhaps not as it was but as it should have been. One of those films that makes you suspect that life mIght be worth living Could it work as a musical?

JohnHowardReid Deeply moving Southern vignette. The script is artfully constructed for maximum dramatic impact. So many outstanding scenes, capped by a tour-de-force climax and a delightful reprise postscript, it's almost more than the emotions can stand. Ford has a ball, often delineating his setting and characters with broad strokes, but all the more effective for the master's touch. A few slight lapses are made by two or three of the actors, but what does that matter compared to the picture's overall emotional impact? The Ford Stock Company is out in overwhelming parade force. The movies also features "A"-budget sets and strikingly atmospheric black-and-white photography, plus a music score by the ever-reliable Victor Young (who uses Steven Foster most appealingly). In all, a movie to treasure. I'd rate it 99%.Ford said to me that this was his favorite movie of all the movies he had directed. Even though critics had exalted many others of his films to the skies, Ford thought "The Sun Shines Bright" was his greatest achievement. And I am really tempted to agree!

Robert J. Maxwell The director was John Ford, a notorious teller of tales. When asked by critics which of his movies he liked best, he sometimes cited "The Sun Shines Bright." To understand why he'd make such an outrageous claim, we must understand that Ford loved to cause disappointment and pain in others -- especially critics.Actually it's a low-budget and confusing jumble of several of Irwin S. Cobb's stories about the laid-back South. Not a bankable name among the cast. But we do get to see the last of John's brother Francis as a tattered old drunk in a coonskin hat, a role he'd been playing for twenty years. Frank had been a matinée idol in the early years of motion pictures, a handsome young hero, and it must have pained him to be so degraded on the screen but, as I say, John loved to see pain.And if you're truly into political correctness, this is an excellent place not to look for it. The judge is the pudding-faced Charles Winninger. He's a fair and courageous judge. Everyone realizes that. But still he has one of those chocolate-colored jockeys holding up a hitching post in front of his gate. That's not to mention Steppin Fetchit: "Yassuh, Boss, but you overslepp." But it's certainly a John Ford project. Many of his stock company put in their appearances: Jane Darwell, Jack Pennick, Russell Simpson, Grant Withers, Milburn Stone, among others. We even get to see an early work of John Russell and the teen-aged Patrick Wayne. Russell is a curious-looking guy. He was an intelligence officer on Guadalcanal with the Marine Corps and he looks it -- tall, brawny, handsome. But handsome in a way that's uncanny, unearthly, as if he were really an animated plastic mannequin.It's definitely a lesser work, by turns raucous and sentimental. Ford pulls out all his usual stunts and throws them haphazardly together. There's the grand march, the singing of hymns, the mano a mano fight, the Ladies Temperance Society. If you want nothing more than to sit back and be diverted for an hour and a half, this should do the job.

davnimm1956 This film although rarely shown, has one beautiful vignette after another. Although a remake of Fords JUDGE PRIEST,we see a small town,where everybody is brought together by Charlie Winninger who portrays Judge Priest. The scene where he campaigns for the decent burial for the Prostitute who has come home to die, just might be one of the finest sequences ever put on film. A film only Ford could pull off, and does!! Don,t miss this one.