An incredible film from the sense that there are these big sweeping visual layouts, and a great insight into the world being presented. That being said the story takes you over always and sweeps you away so you forget you’re watching brilliant technique and only feel the acting beats and shifts. John Ford is a phenomenal director especially with actors. The performances here are very nuanced while still being direct and bold and strong. There's an emotional complexity in this film that signals again this shift back towards incorporating theater acting techniques into cinema so as to reduce the bluntness of movie acting and make it something more naturalistic.
Ford communicates his themes through framing and set design. His shots have a great deal of intricacy and the camera movements are very fluid and serve the storytelling. The brilliance of this filmmaking is how it serves the storytelling on an emotional level.
You can see the morality of the time being challenged by the war and a weird pullback in terms of the moral views of the western world. There is a push for traditional values but also a progressive stance towards that push. Ford is a lot more of a liberal than he might lead on in his Westerns and this film really hints at that.
The filmmaking definitely compares against Citizen Kane in style, although it was more static and painted than the abstract, super wide angle, forced perspective and insane crane movement of some of Welles' photography.