Cheyenne is a Western, a romance, a comedy, a film noir, even a musical, all genres at which director Walsh excelled. The post-war period was great for all these genres; Cheyenne even reminds one of John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers (1956), having been written by Thames Williamson and Alan LeMay -- the latter wrote the novel The Seachers -- and with music by Warner Brothers stalwart Max Steiner, who also did the music for Ford's film. The superb black-and-white cinematography for Cheyenne was by Sid Hickox, who photgraphed a number of Walsh's films.
Walsh made poetry out of Western iconography: the good girl (Jane Wyman as Ann Kincaid), bad girl (Janis Paige as Emily Carson), the bad guy who is trying to be good (Dennis Morgan as James Wylie), the bad guy who leads a gang of stagecoach robbers (Arthur Kennedy as The Sundance Kid) and even an ineffective sheriff played somewhat for laughs (Alan Hale as Fred Durkin) and a stagecoach manager who is a crook (Bruce Bennett as Ed Landers, "the poet" who replaces money in strong boxes with poems). Almost everyone is pretending to be someone else, as Ed Landers falls for Emily Carson and her suggestive saloon songs and skimpy outfits while Wylie falls for buttoned-to-the-neck Ann Kincaid, who is actually married to Bennett, the poet. The town of Cheyenne is crowded with drinkers and gamblers while the location shooting (in Arizona) represents the untamed wilderness, where robberies and gunfights take place, away from "civilized" towns.
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