Even as a spectacular victim of its own success, the film retains a primitive, raw, vulgarly masculine power that leaves it powerful in all the right ways, and surprisingly un-dated.
Arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s -- a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.
It's one of the great, arrogant take-it-or-leave-it jobs in history, and by this point it is so beyond either defense or attack that I come neither to praise nor to bury it but merely to describe it.
