"Ford remade The Sun Shines Bright from his 1934 film Judge Priest with Will Rogers first playing the role that Charles Winninger assumed nearly twenty years later. Set during 1905 in Fairfield, Kentucky and derived from three short stories by Irvin S. Cobb, Ford’s later film explores possibilities that he also presents in his earlier post-World War II workssuch as My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948) and The Searchers (1956). The little-known and underappreciated The Sun Shines Bright, however, poses a striking vision of Ford’s post-war concerns. Such a vision, as Ford makes clear, does not occur beyond the context of very human ambiguities. It sheds light on complicated personal and historical relationships, the harm of local secrets, and the limits imposed by those same ambiguities on even the most well-meaning of communal desires. Even with those limitations and almost 60 years on, The Sun Shines Bright still portrays a type of open-ended concern within the American experience. Such openness, in turn, invites an American self-examination that has yet to fully occur. Extending such a call through the prism of race, certainly America’s central issue at the time of the film’s release, only heightens the power of the film’s still-existing invitation."

in senses of cinema - John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright and the Search for a Moral Order