Johnny Guitar ****½ (1954, Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Scott Brady) – Classic Film Review 378

Joan Crawford stars in Johnny Guitar as the strong-willed, gun-toting saloon queen called Vienna in her first Western since 1928’s The Law of the Range.

Nicholas Ray’s 1954 camp, kitsch Western is irresistibly strange, indeed quite outlandish, and is now a firmly established cult favourite. It has lots of joys, but the biggest is that Crawford is completely weird and wonderful in her grotesquely offbeat performance and unconventional appearance.

Mercedes McCambridge enjoys her finest hour in the movies and isn’t far behind Crawford in making a huge, splashy impression as over-righteous homesteader Emma Small, determinedly fighting it out with Crawford for local supremacy.

Crawford’s got gentle gunman Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), her lover Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady) and a slew of baddies on her side, while poor old McCambridge has to make do with the law and various upright townsfolk homebodies.

Vienna is wrongly suspected of murder and robbery after four men hold up a stagecoach and kill a man and she helps a wounded gang member at her saloon outside of town. The Arizona frontier town officials, led by Emma Small, form a lynch mob and arrive at the saloon to seize Vienna’s friends, the Dancin’ Kid and his men. Vienna’s helped in her stand against the mob, when an old acquaintance, Johnny Guitar, turns up (‘I’m a stranger here myself’).

The Crawford-McCambridge catfight hots up into a battle royal, with mesmerising performances by the two women. They couldn’t be better. And they’ve got a stupendous cast of great male Western veteran players to back them up: Ernest Borgnine, Ward Bond, John Carradine, Ben Cooper, Royal Dano, Frank Ferguson, Paul Fix, Rhys Williams, Ian MacDonald, Will Wright, John Maxwell, Robert Osterloh, Trevor Bardette, Sheb Wooley and Denver Pyle. It’s a cast to rival any that John Ford could conjure up.

There is a moody, symbolic script by Philip Yordan, based on the novel by Roy Chanslor, and, with Harry Stradling Sr’s eye-catching cinematography (filmed in the confusingly named TruColor process), the movie has the unmistakable stamp of Ray’s unique directorial style all over it.

Of course, we are accustomed to, and expect, Westerns set in the big wide open spaces, but this one is very set-bound, stagey and artificial and all the more successful and fascinating because of it.

Martin Scorsese calls it ‘compulsive and passionate’, so who are we to disagree?

Crawford and McCambridge fought off camera too. One night, in a drunken rage, a jealous Crawford broke into McCambridge’s dressing room, slashed her costumes and scattered them along an Arizona highway. Cast and crew had to collect them. McCambridge blamed her next two years out of work on Crawford’s repeated attempts to blacklist her.

Hayden said afterwards: ‘There is not enough money in Hollywood to lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford. And I like money.’

Johnny Guitar is directed by Nicholas Ray, runs 111 minutes, is released by Republic, is written by Philip Yordan, based on the novel by Roy Chanslor, is shot in TruColor by Harry Stradling Sr, is produced by Nicholas Ray, and is scored by Victor Young.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Film Review 378

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