Hell Bent

The amount of material covered in John Ford’s Hell Bent, his ninth feature overall and third surviving, is enough to comfortably fill an 80-90 minute long film. At fifty-one minutes, though, everything ends up feeling stunted and shallow. Remove a couple of things and allow the rest to fill out the abbreviated runtime fully, and you could have an entertaining little western on your hands. As it stands, Hell Bent just feels too threadbare to really garner any interest. There isn’t even a big ...