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#649 - Johnny Guitar
Nicholas Ray, 1954
A guitar-wielding cowboy rides into a frontier settlement where his old flame, who has managed to build her own saloon, is being hassled by a cattle baron and an heiress.
Having already seen Nicholas Ray's somewhat left-field takes on the film noir and teen movie genres with In a Lonely Place and Rebel Without a Cause respectively, I was of course expecting him to do something appropriately off-kilter with the Western in 1954's Johnny Guitar. At its most basic, it follows the tried-and-true Western formula of a lone rider (here the eponymous character played by Sterling Hayden) riding into a tense situation. He's been employed to work as a guitar player at a saloon at the request of its no-nonsense owner (Joan Crawford) because she just so happens to have had a prior relationship with Hayden. Crawford has managed to carve out a fairly successful living for herself, but she still faces considerable opposition from a local heiress (Mercedes McCambridge) and a cattle rancher (Ward Bond). Throw in a gang of outlaws, the leader of whom (Scott Brady) is fixated on his erstwhile lover Crawford while also apparently indifferent to McCambridge's apparent affection for him (which also fuels her hatred of Crawford, but I'll come back to that), and you have a complicated enough situation to sustain a feature film, and that's before Hayden demonstrates how fast he is with a gun...
On a superficial level, Johnny Guitar ticks all the boxes for being a solid Western. Characters cover the spectrum of morality and motivations without resorting to bland heroics or villainy; they are developed through some extremely melodramatic turns of phrase and countenances that make the film seem overly artificial even by the standards of your average Hollywood Western. This is not a strike against the film as there's a craft to the diction that makes it catch the ear in most of the right ways. The characterisation is also surprisingly solid as it builds around a web of complex romances. It's all too easy to interpret a suppressed lesbian subtext between McCambridge and Crawford (especially considering how the former's interest in Brady has to be mentioned by the characters rather than be immediately evident, though this can also be justified by her being an extremely uptight and conflicted puritan). In any case, McCambridge turns her bloody-minded hatred of Crawford into the core of her character and makes for one of the most love-to-hate characters I've seen in a while. The relationship between Crawford and Hayden, meanwhile, is only just given the slightest of justifications but it still works just fine as the two swap verbose declarations of their feelings that are questionable in their sincerity but are still fun to watch. Other characters are given just enough definition to keep the film going, whether it's Ernest Borgnine as Brady's brutish sidekick who develops his own bitter rivalry with Hayden or Ben Cooper as the youthful member of Brady's gang who has his own complicated attitude towards Crawford.
Johnny Guitar may not be all that great in its own right but it deserves acknowledgement for providing a decent enough variation on what could have been yet another generic 1950s Western. The relatively bizarre subversions that are put into place in regards to both plot and characterisation definitely make it stand out, though it's arguably a bit too long and drawn-out for its own good. Even though I felt like I might have fallen asleep during the film's second half (which is admittedly where the action picks up as buildings are destroyed, people are lynched, and tense shoot-outs unfold), I would put that down to just being tired rather than anything seriously wrong with this film. In short, Johnny Guitar may look just like every other Western that was being churned out to feed an expectant demand during the 1950s, but it manages to be anything but that as it weaves a tale of complex relationships and morally difficult conflicts. Definitely worth checking out if you're looking for a Western that's different to all the others in just about all the ways that count.
Nicholas Ray, 1954
A guitar-wielding cowboy rides into a frontier settlement where his old flame, who has managed to build her own saloon, is being hassled by a cattle baron and an heiress.
Having already seen Nicholas Ray's somewhat left-field takes on the film noir and teen movie genres with In a Lonely Place and Rebel Without a Cause respectively, I was of course expecting him to do something appropriately off-kilter with the Western in 1954's Johnny Guitar. At its most basic, it follows the tried-and-true Western formula of a lone rider (here the eponymous character played by Sterling Hayden) riding into a tense situation. He's been employed to work as a guitar player at a saloon at the request of its no-nonsense owner (Joan Crawford) because she just so happens to have had a prior relationship with Hayden. Crawford has managed to carve out a fairly successful living for herself, but she still faces considerable opposition from a local heiress (Mercedes McCambridge) and a cattle rancher (Ward Bond). Throw in a gang of outlaws, the leader of whom (Scott Brady) is fixated on his erstwhile lover Crawford while also apparently indifferent to McCambridge's apparent affection for him (which also fuels her hatred of Crawford, but I'll come back to that), and you have a complicated enough situation to sustain a feature film, and that's before Hayden demonstrates how fast he is with a gun...
On a superficial level, Johnny Guitar ticks all the boxes for being a solid Western. Characters cover the spectrum of morality and motivations without resorting to bland heroics or villainy; they are developed through some extremely melodramatic turns of phrase and countenances that make the film seem overly artificial even by the standards of your average Hollywood Western. This is not a strike against the film as there's a craft to the diction that makes it catch the ear in most of the right ways. The characterisation is also surprisingly solid as it builds around a web of complex romances. It's all too easy to interpret a suppressed lesbian subtext between McCambridge and Crawford (especially considering how the former's interest in Brady has to be mentioned by the characters rather than be immediately evident, though this can also be justified by her being an extremely uptight and conflicted puritan). In any case, McCambridge turns her bloody-minded hatred of Crawford into the core of her character and makes for one of the most love-to-hate characters I've seen in a while. The relationship between Crawford and Hayden, meanwhile, is only just given the slightest of justifications but it still works just fine as the two swap verbose declarations of their feelings that are questionable in their sincerity but are still fun to watch. Other characters are given just enough definition to keep the film going, whether it's Ernest Borgnine as Brady's brutish sidekick who develops his own bitter rivalry with Hayden or Ben Cooper as the youthful member of Brady's gang who has his own complicated attitude towards Crawford.
Johnny Guitar may not be all that great in its own right but it deserves acknowledgement for providing a decent enough variation on what could have been yet another generic 1950s Western. The relatively bizarre subversions that are put into place in regards to both plot and characterisation definitely make it stand out, though it's arguably a bit too long and drawn-out for its own good. Even though I felt like I might have fallen asleep during the film's second half (which is admittedly where the action picks up as buildings are destroyed, people are lynched, and tense shoot-outs unfold), I would put that down to just being tired rather than anything seriously wrong with this film. In short, Johnny Guitar may look just like every other Western that was being churned out to feed an expectant demand during the 1950s, but it manages to be anything but that as it weaves a tale of complex relationships and morally difficult conflicts. Definitely worth checking out if you're looking for a Western that's different to all the others in just about all the ways that count.