The Sun Shines Bright

The Sun Shines Bright is a 1953 American comedy-drama Western film directed by John Ford, based on material taken from a series of Irvin S. Cobb "Judge Priest" short stories featured in The Saturday Evening Post in the 1910s, specifically "The Sun Shines Bright", "The Mob from Massac", and "The Lord Provides".

Ford had adapted some of the same material in 1934 in his film Judge Priest. That film originally had a scene depicting an attempted lynching of Poindexter (and Priest’s condemnation of the act), but it was cut by 20th Century Fox. The omission was one of the reasons Ford loosely reshaped the Cobb stories two decades later as The Sun Shines Bright for Republic Pictures, this time including Judge Priest's defusing of the mob determined to lynch a young black character named Woodford. In both films, Stepin Fetchit plays the part of Judge Priest's assistant, Poindexter.

In later years, the film was championed by critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum and Dave Kehr, who called it "a masterpiece". Ford himself had often cited The Sun Shines Bright as his favorite among all his films. However Peter Bogdanovich, who knew Ford, surmised that the director's "perverse enthronement" of it as one of his very best was largely based on its general dismissal by critics and audiences, and had little to do with the merits of the film itself.