This is a good, classic western. It makes great use of the location. Stagecoach had already set the precedent in terms of using Monument Valley as a location and filming extreme wide shots to capture the peaks in an aesthetically laid out manner with the roads running through the valley. This film just piggybacks off that successful formula.
Henry Fonda is great as the tough lawman who rolls into town, however, the anti-hero character trope in the Western hasn’t really emerged yet. Arguably John Wayne in Stagecoach is more akin to the Clint Eastwood Western Anti-hero but the genre still kind of lives in this good cowboy vs. bad cowboy universe. The genre will shift later as the anti-hero really takes hold in American culture, and Clint Eastwood will be at the forefront of that shift.
This film is definitely showing that the Westerns of this period as well as the film noirs display a “macho man”, a strong, independent, gun slinging American man who dominates women in the storyline and the universe. The worlds of these films are very much male dominate and seem to be part of the gender political shift that is occurring post war as women are being pushed back into the house and into submissive roles in life. You see that desire to repress them and make them subservient to men reflected in their portrayal onscreen as ancillary characters with less dialogue and importance to the plot.
The American man in the 30’s was a lot more showy and even feminine in ways. Now the “tough guy” attitude postwar is definitely indicative of a social shift of machissmo and physical and sexual dominance.