JOHNNY GUITAR

This 1954 offering from director Nicholas Ray has to be the strangest Western from that period.

For a start, notwithstanding the title it is two female characters who totally dominate, with the male characters taking a back seat for the most part.  

I was aware coming into this film that Joan Crawford has a lead role.  She plays Vienna, a woman with a dodgy past (probably prostitution, don’t ask) who has somehow managed to build a saloon bar/casino.  It's in the middle of nowhere for now but Vienna knows that a railroad depot is going to be built there any day soon.

Vienna just wants to be left alone to make money but there's no hope of that whilst the other female character, Emma, is around.  The entire plot of the film is driven by Emma's attempts to destroy Vienna, such is the intensity of her hatred for her.  Emma is played by an actress new to me, Mercedes McCambridge, who gives an extraordinary performance as a seething ball of anger.

I was a little unclear as to what Emma's status was but a bit of research afterwards clarified that she is a rich landowner who owns the local bank.

She seems to have several reasons for hating Vienna.  Maybe she's jealous of another woman acquiring wealth and status.  Maybe she's worried about what the coming railroad will mean for her personally and for the wider community.  And apparently she's attracted to the 'Dancin' Kid' who used to be a lover of Vienna's.

The Dancin' Kid doesn't do any dancing and is too old to be a kid anymore, but he is leader of a gang who might have robbed a stagecoach at the start of the film.  Emma's brother was killed during the robbery, so she and the townsfolk are feeling antagonistic towards the Kid (to put it mildly).

And because of Vienna's past relationship with the Kid she too is under suspicion, not that she feels any need to go out of her way to placate anyone.   

She's magnificently arrogant and defiant throughout all her tribulations.  Her very first line, delivered from the top of the stairs outside her office to the townsfolk who have stormed into the saloon, is "Down there I sell whiskey and cards. All you can buy up these stairs is a bullet in the head.  Now which do you want?"

In this initial scene she is a striking figure, dressed in a black shirt and black trousers, with a brightly coloured ribbon tied around her neck, and her mouth a rectangle of bright red lipstick.  Her outfits throughout are striking.  There is for example a surreal scene in which a posse storm into her saloon only to to find her calmly playing a piano, dressed in a flowing white dress.  

Johnny Guitar himself (another improbable name) is played by Sterling Hayden in fine laconic form.  He turns up at the saloon on the same day as the stagecoach robbery, invited there by Vienna to entertain her customers.  We later learn that he's very handy with guns and that five years earlier he and Vienna had had a torrid love affair.  

Needless to say, by the end of even this film, strange as it is, they are very much an item again.  

However I didn't find their relationship believable due to zero chemistry between them, sexual or otherwise.  Likewise nothing in the film persuaded me that Vienna and the Kid ever meant anything to each other, or that Emma feels anything for the Kid. 

Emotions that were already high due to the stagecoach robbery are further inflamed when the Kid and his gang rob the local bank.  It happens on the day of the funeral for Emma's brother so that for the rest of the film everyone in the posse, led by Emma, are dressed very smartly in black, which makes for some unusual and impressive visuals.

In fact the look of the film is one of its strengths.  The saloon for example is constructed against a mountain cliff, so that the back wall is made of exposed red rock.  There is a theatrical aesthetic throughout, enhanced by the somewhat mannered dialogue which borders on the pretentious at times but which overall I enjoyed.  

Which is not to say that there's not a decent amount of action, with the film culminating with the Kid and his gang, together with Vienna and Johnny, trapped in their lair by Emma and the posse.

The three members of Kid’s gang are each memorable in their own way.  There's young Turkey who likes to act tough but who betrays Vienna in the desperate hope it will save his skin (spoiler alert: it doesn't).  There's taciturn Corey who's loyal to the Kid throughout, and as a result gets knifed in the back by the third member of the gang, Bart, well played by Ernest Borgnine as someone out for himself in all situations.

Good support is also provided by Ward Bond as a leading landowner who likes to throw his weight about but who ends up playing second fiddle to Emma, and by John Carradine, as a loyal employee of Vienna's who dies trying to help her.

It's a film well worth watching for all of its weirdness and for all the elements that have made it a camp classic: it's extravagant style, its subversive gender roles, and its heightened melodrama.

RATING: ✓✓ Good Times