Melodrama does creep up, however, during the trek through the desert. And a religious angle slides into the plot, when Carey's character, possibly exhausted from hunger and the heat, starts reading the Gospels and believes that the events in some crucial chapters are, in fact, instructions for what these three men ought to do next. (The parallel to the Three Wise Men is used frequently). A few of the following events (such as Wayne finding a donkey and a lamb, which was referred to in the Biblical text) may be too crushingly obvious for hard-bitten cynics.
There's also an awkwardly handled point in which Bond's character discovers the destroyed well, and the abandoned wagon, and comes to the conclusion that the three men were responsible for this -- so he says that he'd like to find these men dead rather than alive. I'm not saying that this isn't logical, but it seems a bit out of place during a movie where the Bond character is more of a humorous figure to suggest that this man would figure the worst in the three men he was chasing, and would want them dead. I suppose this does add a bit of realism to the whole affair, however.
I actually wished that the movie had stuck with one tone, instead of becoming confused on what movie it ought to be. Should this have been a charming comedic/Western, or a melodramatic, sappy Western? John Ford is quite good in mixing the corny, the comedic, the action, and the serious in most of his pictures, and even this movie does a good job of the mix most of the time --- but, then again, this is not one of Ford's best pictures (try The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or the Searchers, or My Darling Clementine), and John Wayne wasn't as great a performer here, as he would be later on. Wayne is great in the more comedic sequences, but during the more melodramatic passages in the desert, I fear that he tries too much occasionally.
For me, the comedic passages were the best. The first portion, I've already mentioned before. And when these cowboys find themselves saddled with a newborn child, it becomes Three Men and a Baby Goes West. And (spoiler) when John Wayne is finally caught, and gets sent back to town for trial, the film again becomes a gentle comedy, with the whole issue of funny names coming back to haunt Wayne's character.
