Johnny Guitar (1954)

Nicholas Ray is an expert on explosiveness on film. Johnny Guitar, a sort of alternative take on westerns, attests to that skill. Joan Crawford plays the saloon owner and her presence in this film is unlike any other. This film is built around her. Tensions abound and I think the story is just an excuse to focus on these tensions, the character of which the viewer has to guess for herself as one looks at the gazes that pass between Crawford's saloon owner and her arch enemy Emma (played by Mercedes McCambridge), a fierce cattle baron (but bad readings of this have been made as well). A bunch of outlaws and portentous law-abiding types and cowboys hang around the saloon, many of whom are of course gunslinging dangerous folks, and trouble is stirred up, lots of it: showdowns, hideouts, confrontations, witch-hunts. It's hard to leave the story on a surface level - the level of aggression would be quite unintelligible then. Something else is going on, and "railroad", "robbery" and jealousy are mere hints at a story about lots of other things (McCarthy's hunt of communists, some have suggested, but I don't know if that was my immediate reaction - another aspect that struck me when I watched it was how the film defies the usual anti-modernism of western movies; here it's the villains who oppose the railroad). What speaks for Johnny Guitar is also its look: the strong colors and the minimal sets bring out the tensions I talked about in a wonderfully sleazy way. Some of the conversations are full of melodrama but the melodrama takes place between gritted teeth and atypical gender structures. Its hard to explain the edginess of Johnny Guitar: on the face of it, there's nothing special here. But then again, that ferocity speaks volumes, and as I said I'm not sure about what. But hey, as I like Douglas Sirk's play with Hollywood conventions it might not be surprising that I also like the artificial-subversive feel of Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar.