Perhaps we should make a distinction between Westerns and cowboy movies, one we can use when a film like “Will Penny” comes along. This isn’t a Western; it’s slung too close to the ground for that (…) “Will Penny” occupies this land of “real” cowboys most convincingly. Its heroes are not very handsome or glamorous. Its title character, played by Charlton Heston, is a man in his mid-40s who has been away from society so long he hardly knows how to react when he is treated as a civilized being. And its love story, involving Heston and Joan Hackett, is one of the most satisfying I can remember (…) The admirable thing about the movie is its devotion to real life. These are the kind of people, we feel, who must really have inhabited the West: common, direct, painfully shy in social situations and very honest. — Roger Ebert