Johnny Guitar (1954)

Johnny Guitar is a Western directed by Nicholas Ray.  It is a subversive Western.  It is a gender-bending and anti-McCarthyist Western.  It is a picture that proliferates opinion.  Roger Ebert puts it in his list of Great Movies and calls it a "melodrama."  Scorsese liked the expressionistic colors.  Directors of the French New Wave, like Godard,  argued Ray was an auteur above many others.  Truffaut called the film a remake of Beauty and the Beast with Joan Crawford as the beast.  Bogdanovich is said to have lectured only referring to the film via jokes. The actors in the film wished to forget it and the criticism at the time was largely disparaging.  And today, the enduring quality of the film is now secured by the Library of Congress who has added it to its list of films for preservation.

The quality of the film seems impossible to reduce to an aspect and its place as an all-time great seems debatable for any particular reason.  The reason it is a great film generally, is that it continues to elicit strong and varied reactions to it.

With the quantity of differences in mind, Johnny Guitar may be a film best gauged by its ability to elicit new responses; that is, it may be a film in which analysis must shift toward synthesis in order to be appreciated.  Analyzing a single facet will not serve as well as adding new reasons to the list of prior reasons, and deciding the outcome as the sum of all perspectives.  The shift toward quantity seems fitting too, considering director Nicholas Ray branded film an "eclectic" art.

So what about the film?  A first viewing deserves privilege over a second viewing.  For example, one has to ask why Vienna (Joan Crawford) waits for a mob to arrive at her bar while wearing a white dress and sitting at a piano.  It may be part of her confidence as a woman or her ability to turn the tide with a phrase.  Perhaps both.  At any rate, it is a gamble on her part and a second viewing placates the intensity of feeling with an understanding that comes from hindsight.

Another famous scene is the conversation Vienna and Johnny (Sterling Hayden) have after their tiff.  The entire conversation has only the semblance of making up.  It begins with Johnny asking, "How many men have you forgotten?"  Vienna coolly replies, 'As many women as you've remembered."  At another point, Johnny asks Vienna to lie to him and she does, emphatically lying to him.  Agreements never come easily in the film.  Instead, the individual differences amplify the intensity of the film.

Johnny Guitar is a great film, but precisely because of how many responses are at stake in viewing.  The difference in kinds of greatness is this: there are great films that lend themselves to answers (like "rosebud" in Citizen Kane) and great films that allow differences to maintain their integrity over and above the demands of plot structure.  Johnny Guitar reaches for the latter.

IMDb rates this film 7.7 stars out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)

Other films by Nicholas Ray include In a Lonely Place, They Live by Night, and Rebel without a Cause.