Johnny Guitar

“Baroque—very baroque” was Nicholas Ray’s summary comment on Johnny Guitar, a film that shows off his talent for transforming intractable material into a highly personal work of art. Joan Crawford plays a saloonkeeper, Vienna, whose financial savvy (she owns a large chunk of Arizona valley made valuable by the coming railroad) makes her fellow townspeople queasy. Under the baton of rancher Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), whose ancient jealousy of Vienna knows no bounds, the community is orchestrated into a lynch mob. Sterling Hayden’s Johnny Guitar is an unlikely hero at best, a laconic gunman who is forced by virtue of conscience and intelligence to take a stand against the real enemy: insidious mob psychology fueled by an outrageous sexual hypocrisy. (“Never saw a woman who was more like a man. Acts like one, thinks like one, sometimes makes me feel I'm not one,” remarks one of the worker-bees attending Vienna.) At once an outspoken social commentary—a Western with an attitude—and a surreal passion play, its stage a stony outcropping on which sits this saloon, this piano, this Vienna in a white evening dress, Johnny Guitar is weird and captivating. Shortly before he died, Fassbinder named it one of his top ten favorite films.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Philip Yordan, based on a novel by Roy Chanslor. Photographed by Harry Stradling. With Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Scott Brady, Mercedes McCambridge. (110 mins, Color, 35mm, From Paramount Pictures)