Critics reviews

Order is eventually restored over a series of dead bodies, but through its unsettling of gender roles in the surreal landscape of Sedona, Nicholas Ray's film serves as a ballad for a time of deep distrust in Hollywood. "Operatic" is the term that best describes this production, noted for its archetypal figures, dramatic choreography, costume changes, and extraordinary use of color, even if the romantic musical theme, scored by Victor Young, is applied with a light touch.

Even seen today, more than 60 years after its release, Johnny Guitar still feels radical. Its subverted norms of genre and gender are rendered in vivid images that sear themselves into the brain... The film also contains one of the most tender moments in any western, in which Johnny's taciturn façade breaks down and he begs Vienna to lie to him and tell him that she still loves him. Her acquiescence, delivered with a stony poker face, is bitter succor.

When a wounded teenage gunslinger named Turkey (Ben Cooper) was forced by an angry mob to betray his only friend, Vienna, with a lie in order to save his life but then was lynched anyway, I couldn't yet read this outrage as a conscious reference to the contemporaneous horrors of the Hollywood witch hunt. But the scene, as shocking as it was, nevertheless felt real and authentic in its awful immediacy, and that was only one of the many shocks that the film had to offer.

The towering Hayden, with his laconically insinuating, behind-the-beat baritone and despair-filled eyes, has the coolest delivery in classic Hollywood, and it clashes gloriously with the overwhelming heat of Crawford's ferocious stillness and blowtorch stare. The acidulous palette of the costumes and the décor conjure Ray's insolent, isolated fury; though the action is set in the nineteenth century, the actors break out of the story to foreshadow the stylishly electric revolutions to come.

Lyrical intensity and inspired lunacy charge both its big moments, like the indelible image of Vienna in a billowing white dress playing the piano while a lynch mob seethes around her; and its small moments, like the deft flourish with which Johnny catches a whiskey glass as it rolls off the bar. This is one of those rapturous, intoxicating movies that seems at times to be primarily about its own movie-ness.

Arizona hills and Republic sets, romanticism and disillusionment and florid gravity, Hayden's wounded Roy Rogers send-up and Crawford towering like María Casares in leather breeches, these are the components of Ray's overwhelming ballad. Lynching parties and forced confessions pin it to the anxious era of McCarthyism, hidden waterfall portals and the Fauvist hues of Trucolor free it into the timeless realm of enchantment.

Johnny Guitar may not have the pedigree of The Searchers or the easy lovability of Rio Bravo, but it's arguably twice as compelling as any classic western because it's internally calibrated to a completely unique rhythm. Ray turned every genre into dance, sometimes a sensual ballet, sometimes a furious tango. Johnny Guitar is his paranoid waltz, with enough partner changes and tempo changes to make your head spin.

A favorite of the French New Wave's critics-turned-auteurs, this vivid and emotionally hysterical seduction doesn't focus on traveling troubadour and reluctant hero Johnny "Guitar" Logan (Sterling Hayden) as much as it does his ex-lover, Vienna (Crawford), the gun-toting owner of a gambling saloon and a steely reserve.

That's part of the appeal of Johnny Guitar: its lurid, Trucolor-soaked veneer seems tailor-made for retroactive pomo delineation, its rich surfaces ever-ready to be mined for meaning. It's a film that's many things to many people, from camp spectacular to revisionist genre epic, and nearly every reading seems viable. Was it Nicholas Ray's intention to subvert every expectation, to undermine the conventions of the most American of genres?

Extravagance of image and action are circumstances we customarily associate with the work of Nicholas Ray, yet the manner in which this film appears to take place in a universe that will frequently thwart custom or convention becomes emphasised even before we know who the characters are, where they are located or what their associations or motivations might be.

...It's Ray's most aesthetic film. But it's every bit as personal as IN A LONELY PLACE or WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden don't seem fit for the west, and the same could be said of their gender roles, but it's their complete discomfort that gives the film its tense and uneasy beauty. Ray has a knack for finding poetry where others would surely fumble, and here he's at his most poetic.

Johnny Guitar is Ray's most CinemaScope-like non-Scope film. In addition to finding the ability to expressively manipulate color that would find its way into all his subsequent films (Bitter Victory excepted), Ray also places bodies in space that activate either side of the screen, creating a horizontal balance to the frame that appears in Rebel, Bigger than Life... Thanks to the narrower ratio and the insane colors, however, Johnny Guitar feels ready to explode in violent ecstasy.