Josh Lewis’s review published on Letterboxd:
A very effective 1970s update on the old-school western strongman's moral quest to lead the scared and defenseless against those corrupting and destroying their town.
The deceptively plain direction is by an aging Old Hollywood B-movie legend Phil Karlson who lived long enough to see the death of the noir and had to instead shift his lean, no-frills, blunt-force skills toward the rise of the cathartically gruesome post-Dirty Harry vigilante justice/revenge movie and the dirty regional outlaw exploitation actioner that would make Burt Reynolds a movie star; and the unique factor comes in the very large form of Texas legend Joe Don Baker as the real-life wrestler-turned-sheriff Buford Pusser who waged something of a one-man-army crusade against gambling, moonshining and prostitution in his Tennessee county by bashing peoples skulls open with a large stick.
Baker manages to find some charming personality and a legitimate emotional dimension to what could've easily been a generic contradiction of a character (both sensitive, tortured family man and unstoppable sweaty brute), and though it's undeniably a shaggy and overlong conservative law & order fantasy that includes ridiculous moments like Baker ionately tearing his shirt off while representing himself in court (and being instantly found not guilty!) I very much appreciated that despite the rousing call-to-arms nature of it that turned it into a surprise blockbuster hit, Karlson manages to do so without sacrificing the crude and punishing application of force at its center.
A quality Kael described as "street western"; where the old simplistic, nostalgic formula awkwardly but effectively rubbed up against the ugly, ripped-from-the-headlines modern crime context it was being deployed in. Eventually accruing a kind of raw power out of inelegantly swapping between hokey, friendly country-western TV drama folk hero-isms and genuinely brutal and traumatizing exploitation revenge movie ones. By the final reel this is about as visceral and lurid a piece of downbeat mainstream Americana as you'll find; filled bloody executions and horrible disfigurements and screaming and funerals.
Have to imagine John Flynn, who would work with Joe Don Baker just a few months later on The Outfit and a few years later make his own alienated Paul Schrader character study variation on a similarly dirty and shocking regional revenge movie with Rolling Thunder, pulled quite a bit from this.
