Johnny Guitar

Johnny Guitar is a 1954 Western, released by Republic Pictures. It was directed by Nicholas Ray, from a screenplay by Philip Yordan (credit disputed and claimed by Ben Maddow), based on a novel by Roy Chanslor.

Related Topics:
Johnny Guitar - 1954 - Western - Republic Pictures - Nicholas Ray - Philip Yordan - Ben Maddow - Roy Chanslor

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The film is beloved of French critics and filmmakers, such as François Truffaut, who described it as the "Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream" (see Truffaut, The Films in My Life). Truffaut was especially impressed by its extravagance: the bold colors, the poetry of the dialogue in certain scenes, and the theatricality which results in cowboys vanishing and dying "with the grace of ballerinas". From this perspective, Johnny Guitar is indeed a strange sort of Western when compared with the more sombre and realistic treatments of more classical Western directors such as John Ford and Howard Hawks.

Related Topics:
François Truffaut - Beauty and the Beast - Ballerinas - John Ford - Howard Hawks

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The expressive boldness of the film can also be looked at as a form of allegory and many critics have pointed out that the film is a hidden commentary on the McCarthy witch-hunts. The film is certainly more than just a Western?Truffaut called it "a phony Western". It is a sexual drama with obsessive personalities bordering on madness: the character played by Mercedes McCambridge is obviously the chief villain, but Joan Crawford's character is not entirely likable and Ray shows that Crawford's own psycho-sexual obsession affects her in equally bizarre turns, for example, she dresses entirely in white in a crucial scene where she must confront McCambridge. The strong will and personalities of these two women effectively sideline the men. Sterling Hayden as the eponymous hero is something less of a hero as a result of Crawford's obsession (the fact that he plays a guitar and travels without a gun gives a clue to the downgrading of the Western hero stereotype that is implicit in the title). He is a secondary character, given to indecisiveness. He mostly functions as a passive observer: his tag line is "I am a stranger here myself", which can also describe Nicholas Ray himself (indeed, the line was used as the title of a 1975 documentary about the director).

Related Topics:
McCarthy witch-hunts - 1975 - Documentary

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The reverberations of this sexual drama in a Western setting have impacted upon the genre (e.g. Samuel Fuller's 1957 Western Forty Guns, starring Barbara Stanwyck, revisits the formula of the strong woman) and on foreign cineastes such as Godard, Truffaut, and Sergio Leone. Only Leone, however, was capable of recapitulating the bravura stylistic elements of Johnny Guitar, as he showed in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the plot of which was partly based on Ray's Western.

Related Topics:
Samuel Fuller - Forty Guns - Barbara Stanwyck - Godard - Sergio Leone - Once Upon a Time in the West

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