Critics reviews

Today, we recognize it as Fuller’s most entertaining and audacious assault on classical and generic conventions up to this point in his career—loopy, jarring, and, more than once, jaw-dropping.

Fuller’s aphoristic script sketches a teeming array of characters in deep perspective, and his brash, low-budget methods cram vast swaths of action into relentless tracking shots.

[The film] imprinted on everyone from the Cahiers crowd to Sergio Leone. But it's the tense, protracted undertaker's alley ambush that sideswipes you, Sullivan's stony face conveying for the first time the ambivalence of winning and losing with a single bullet.

Samuel Fuller's most recent film, Forty Guns, is not to be released in France. This is cause for bitter regret, because it is without doubt his best film, along with House of Bamboo. Each scene, each shot of this savage and brutal Western, shot in black and white CinemaScope in under ten days, is so rich in invention – despite an incomprehensible plot – and so bursting with daring conceptions that it reminds one of the extravagances of Abel Gance and Stroheim, or purely and simply of Murnau.