Johnny Guitar

Act 3 is subpar. Overall I liked the story but there were plenty of weak points. Good points: bad guys made sense most of the time. I liked the dialogue in Acts 1 and 2, it was written to be funny and I laughed at the witty dialogue in Act 1, viewing the film for the first time in 2020, about 65 years after it's initial release. A woman saloon owner who becomes an owner through prostitution, foresaking alcohol, planning and patience, applying inside information she obtained from a former customer, seemed believable. Vienna is a good boss, cares about her employees, and she isn't greedy, offering shares of her business to allies willing to help her. She owns a gun and deals confidently, appropriately, nimbly, with the challenges that come her way, and in the story's beginning, seems willing and able to protect herself and her property. Later, the writer makes a mistake by having Vienna greet a mob unarmed, when we knew she knew her way around a weapon. She had no backup plan with a mob, a character mistake the writer shouldn't have had her make, but the writer needed Johnny to rescue her. He should've found a better way than to sacrifice the audience's confidence in the primary character's common sense. Another mistake was made by the writer when Vienna told the kid to save himself, rather than advising him to tell the truth. Nobody would've handled the situation that way, especially a person innocent of a crime. The writer made another mistake when Vienna didn't take cover in the final reel, after Emma shot at her, hitting the window pane. Vienna behaved as if she wasn't in danger, even though Emma had been threatening to kill her, or outright trying to kill her, since Emma entered the story. Lastly, it wasn't believable to have Vienna and Johnny end the story with a passionate kiss when she'd just been shot. It would've been excrutiating for her to lift her injured arm and place it around his neck, but the story showed no hint of her character's being in pain during that kiss. Overall, about half the story worked, the last half didn't. It's harder, in my opinion, to write a strong beginning act so I'll give the film a 3 out of 5. The film was so close to being almost good, especially in Acts 1 and 2. Ms. Crawford was around 55 years old in this movie, yet her character was maybe 35. She played 35 years old convincingly. This was a vehicle for Joan Crawford and it's interesting that she got top billing but not the film named after her character. Think about it this way: what if The Godfather movie were presented to the world as it presently exists, showing how Don Corleone handled his criminal business, but the movie was named Guido, or some other secondary character. That would seem weird. Sexism is awful, for men and for women. Joan Crawford, possibly didn't think mid 1950s America could handle a film named after a former prostitute lead character and so the film is named after her character's love interest. In my opinion, artists must try harder. Their work impacts future artists, which can impact people. Everything costs, and boldness is essential, and it's important for artists to know when to be bold. (I am not referring to boldness in marketing or self promotion, which have their place. I'm talking about trying to serve your people by introducing new concepts, not just trying to entertain them.) An artist cannot blink, even though society believes that it wants the status quo. A corrupted, inefficient, self destructive status quo harms our species, and doesn't serve our longterm interests, which is to transition from self serving, self destructive apex predators into capable, fair, efficient, honorable, generous apex predator/stewards of this planet. Had artists pushed equality harder, sooner, maybe we'd have had more women and minority presidents, chairwomen, generals and world industry leaders by now. Maybe if earlier artists had pushed harder, Star Wars would've featured Leia as the swashbuckling rescuer instead of Luke. Maybe Hermoine would've been the main character in the Harry Potter series. I loved both the Star Wars and Harry Potter storylines but they entertained us, the characters didnt help our species move to where we need to be. Our species is stuck. We're never going to get women and minorities and disenfranchised, powerless characters on deck as the leads in stories unless we write them in. Getting people used to that in stories will help get our species more accepting of diversity in power positions. Everything costs. No one wants to lose their shirt making a film, but many films lose money. An artist needs to decide, am I writing to help my people transition or is money the priority? The more high quality artists allow themselves to settle for money, the longer it will take our species to get to where we need to be, where it increasingly looks as if we might not reach: species maturity and capable, ethical, self management.

I have been watching several high-budget classic westerns during the coronavirus quarantine including "Red River", "The Searchers", "The Wild Bunch", and the 1957 and 2007 versions of "The 3:10 to Yuma". These films are large-scaled affairs from major studios that have long been included on lists of the best American westerns and best American films. These films offer much to think about in their interpretation of the United States and its promise.At first glance, "Johnny Guitar" is in seeming contrast to these highly-regarded films. The film is a B movie released in 1954 by Republic Pictures, a small company known for cost-cutting and for the quick production of films designed for a large audience. Yet, "Johnny Guitar" is still a masterpiece and is also one of the strangest films in the western genre. The film is listed in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" as well as on other listings of best American films.Nicholas Ray directed this film which stars Sterling Hayden as the title character. But the real attractions in the film are the two female leads, Joan Crawford, who plays an ex-prostitute Vienna, who has built a saloon on the outskirts of an Arizona town in the path of an oncoming railroad and Mercedes McCambridge, who plays Emma, a wealthy rancher and a bitter enemy of Vienna. The story turns when Johnny Guitar, a former lover of Vienna's and a gunfighter under his name of Johnny Logan, comes to town to work for Vienna. His arrival helps precipitate a confrontation between Vienna and a local gang and the ranchers who want Vienna and the gang out of the way. The story intensifies quickly, leading to violence.This film is, indeed, over-the-top, camp, and extreme. Vienna and Emma fight bitterly in part over a man in the gang. Many viewers see as well a smoldering love relationship between the two women. Both Crawford and McCambridge act brilliantly with their dislike for each other, (which extended beyond acting) palpable., McCambridge exudes both hatred and sexual frustration in her role as Emma, the unrepentant villain of the piece.. The costuming in the film is garish and becomes increasingly so as it proceeds. The story is flamboyant and wildly romantic in its feelings with sharp, brilliant dialog. The movie includes strong elements of film noir together with its feminism and its extreme characters and situations The women are the leading characters in this movie and dominate the men with their presence. The title song is performed throughout the film by Peggy Lee, who also wrote the lyrics, and has become famous in its own right."Johnny Guitar" is a strange film, particularly for its time, and may not be to the taste of every viewer. It shows the adaptability of the western genre to many different types of films and different ways of viewing the West. I loved it.Robin Friedman

Back in the 1950s it must have seemed a great idea to take compositions that were intentionally shot and framed for 1.33:1 or 1.35:1 and crop them savagely to the ratio of 1.66:1 to give audiences the new thrill of a wider screen presentation in theaters equipped to accomodate the new CinemaScope pictures. These days however the great home video labels like Criterion place a high value in returning to the original compositions. The Criterion Blu-ray release of On The Waterfront, for example, still contains the only home video presentation of the film in its originally shot aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and it is incredible to see the proper full frame compositions. The film makes much more visual sense in its original aspect ratio.So it's really regressive to find the new 2021 4K restoration of Johnny Guitar provided to Olive Signature in the US and Eureka Masters of Cinema in the UK mistakenly return to the widescreen theatrical aspect ratio of the 1950s. Why was that done? Because someone thought it's "authentic"? It isn't. It's repeating the mistake made in the 1950s of moving away from the original, "authentic" 1.33:1 or 1.35:1 image when there is no longer any valid reason to do so.This 2012 standard Olive release of Johnny Guitar on Blu-ray, though inferior in picture quality, is still in 1.35:1 and I'm very happy to own a copy of it despite the arrival of the new 4K restoration releases.There are many films I own on Blu-ray like The Go-between and The Man With The Golden Arm that are savagely cropped in this way on Blu-ray and I still find the older full frame DVD releases of those films make for much better viewing experiences.

There are some good, favourable reviews of 'Johnny Guitar' available , so I'll be brief. The title is a misnomer... Joan Crawford carries the film. While viewers have rightly commented on the views of Martin Scorsese, caught in an 'extra', nobody seems to have said that the dialogue is well written, especially for Crawford who has the perfect answer for anything thrown at her. You really sympathise with her, even in a remarkably lengthy conversation with her ex-lover, which must have wrong-footed audiences at the time.Despite the odd hiccup, when you scratch your head, this is a very entertaining film . Print fine.

It's all been said...hasn't it? The DVD Trucolour is good as is the sound, plus English Subtitles. Extras are an Intro by Martin Scorsese. I try and view it as a "Western with a difference" and leave the theorising to others. It is a crazy film, western or not, with Crawford at her scariest and oddest looking. Closely rivaled by McCambridge who really does scare you she is so ANGRY. What I like is the perhaps mysterious fact of the cast of truly great western character actors who all seem a bit out of place...Borgnine/Dano/Ben Cooper as Brady's gang. Bond, Frank Ferguson (very good), John Carradine, Ian McDonald, Sheb Wooley, Denver Pyle, Paul Fix, Will Wright who between them must notch up 100's of westerns and seem out of kilter with the rest of the bizarre plot. I have to recomend this as "essential viewing" to anyone who loves cinema, and western fans will find much to enjoy. Wonder why Nicholas Ray took it on!!

This 1954 Nicholas Ray western must be ranked as one of the very best on grounds of originality alone. As Martin Scorsese points out in his introduction on the DVD the film breaks all of the rules of the genre, emphasizing emotion and melodramatic excess over the usual classic (re Fordian) simplicity of the Wild West. Women replace men as the main protagonists and by giving everything a very artificial feel (use of color, especially the anarchic use of the colors red, white, black and the muting of blue) and resorting to operatic excess, Ray conjurs up a film of many layers of interpretation. These have been elucidated elsewhere by other reviewers. Whether you see it as feminist tract, Freudian psycho-investigation or McCarthy allegory, it all amounts to an engrossing, fascinating Western experience like no other. The film was a huge influence on Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West, with characters named after musical instruments, a story revolving around the building of a railroad community and by the use of operatic conventions. Where Ennio Morricone invokes Wagner with his use of leitmotifs, giving each character a different theme, Ray invokes Verdi and Puccini with the film's 'chorus' scenes (the first group encounter at "Vienna's" is long and especially reminiscent of the Verdi of say Simon Boccanegra) and intimate arias and duets between characters, the composer Victor Young's music sweeping the action along with tremendous subtlety and gushing drama when required. The acting is extraordinarily melodramatic, especially that of the two leading ladies. Joan Crawford looks to have stepped straight out of a silent film (I thought also of Gloria Swanson in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard) while Mercedes McCambridge plays an evil harridan as if she was Countess Eboli from Verdi's Don Carlos or the Wicked Witch of the West from Fleming's The Wizard of Oz - take your pick! Every scene barring the outside chase scenes feels like an operatic set-piece and it would be easy to criticise the film for being too over the top (I can readily understand American 1954 audiences laughing at the time). That is beside the point for me, for without the use of operatic excess and melodrama Ray would not have been able to create his fabulously original mythic landscape which prompts all those different sub-texts which have engrossed film experts (critics and directors alike) ever since it came out. Ray's treatment of the script is entirely tied to its content as is shown by the fact that his other westerns are treated so differently. As for the DVD itself, the quality is fine. The sharp picture and lush colors really stick out and excite the senses. Recommended to all lovers of westerns. Visconti enthusiasts would probably love it, too.

I liked this atypical and deservedly famous 1954 western. Below, more of my impressions, with some limited SPOILERS.Somewhere in Arizona, in a little town whipped by winds, a tough aging saloonkeeper named Vienna (Joan Crawford, grandiose) struggles against the hostility of a local cattle baron John McIvers (Ward Bond), who doesn't appreciate her owning land and business in a place he considers as exclusive domain of himself and his cronies, like the owner of local bank. Even worse, the sister of the bank owner, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge, impressive), a woman probably mentally unbalanced, hates Vienna passionately for reasons which actually are not fully explained - and quite probably not fully known or understood even by herself...Part of the reason for this hatred can be the jealousy - Emma indeed is fascinated (and in the same time repulsed) by Dancing Kid (Scott Brady), a guy who may or may not be a desperado but who certainly is a dashing dandy. Dancing Kid however always ignored Emma, but intensely courted Vienna... And then, one fateful and eventful day a mysterious stranger rides in the town looking for Vienna - he introduces himself as Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden)... And then the film really begins.Being essentially a confrontation between two very tough and not very nice gals, both of whom carry guns and know how to use them, this is, let's say it again, a very atypical western. The introduction of element of madness - not a very frequent thing in Wild West stories - gives to it a very special taste. The irrational hatred Emma Small feels for Vienna allows for some moments which are really, really scary, even chilling as we can see the evil at work at its most vicious. In this film the great motivator is not the money, not the conflict of interests, not revenge and in fact not even jealousy - all those things either don't exist or are just pretexts - but simply a relentless will to destroy another human beings just BECAUSE!The film has also some elements of parody - I found irresistible the scene in which a mysterious, dangerous looking stranger arrives to a lawless town, carrying for the only weapon a guitar...))) There are many winks to the clichés of the genre, but all containing some parodic elements. On another hand there are also some pretty tough scenes - including a lynching...Joan Crawford was 50 when she turned this film - and gosh was she still hot, both when wearing virginal white and hellishly bright red! Sterling Hayden is excelellent as a Wild West troubadour who has a very special relationship with firearms - he avoids to touch them as much as possible and for a good reason (but I am not saying here why...) Mercedes McCambridge played here probably the role of her life as a woman who seems to be possessed by the devil - and it is probably not an accident that much later she was chosen to give her voice to the demon Pazuzu in "The exorcist"...)))Maybe because it has some irrationality, grotesque and parody in it many people consider it as a major masterpiece - it certainly seems to be particularly liked by French intellectuals. Me however, I am unable to rate it as high. Of course it is a good, interesting film and I enjoyed watching it - but I consider it rather as an interesting oddity, rather than a classic of the genre. Still, a recommended viewing. Enjoy!