Johnny Guitar (1954)
Directed by Nicholas Ray
On the outskirts of town, the hard-nosed Vienna owns a saloon frequented by the undesirables of the region, including Dancin' Kid and his gang. Another patron of Vienna's establishment is Johnny Guitar, a former gunslinger and her lover. When a heist is pulled in town that results in a man's death, Emma Small, Vienna's rival, rallies the townsfolk to take revenge on Vienna's saloon – even without proof of her wrongdoing.
14 connections found
View:
14 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Johnny Guitar to
Brimming with homages to just about every memorable western imaginable, particularly John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), Once Upon a Time in the West is a brilliant metafilm that plays as both a stirring melodrama and a film geek’s cornucopia of in-jokes and movie references.
It's easy to trainspot the picture's references (and it was probably even easier back in the late sixties, when a film like Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar was little more than a decade old), but imperative that you not begrudge the movie its homages.
If that’s true, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 crazy quilt — which is screening this week in a new 35mm print at the Brattle — is an arena where ignorant armies clash by night, Matthew Arnold being one of the few outposts of Western civilization not visited in a movie that cites Velázquez, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani, Aucassin et Nicolette, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Balzac, Hugo, Poe, Robert Browning, Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Rimbaud, Joyce, Céline, Scott Fitzgerald, García Lorca, Les Pieds Nickelés (a French comic book), Beethoven, Madama Butterfly, Mack Sennett, Laurel & Hardy, Pépé le Moko, Johnny Guitar, and every one of Godard’s previous films — not to mention Standard Oil (“Put a tiger in the tank!”), Playboy, Coca-Cola, the invisible panty girdle, Algeria, Vietnam, JFK’s assassination, and the Statue of Liberty relocated to the Île de la Cité in Paris.
He liberally references his favorite films and filmmakers (from Hitchcock to Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar) and he has Samuel Fuller deliver the film's most famous line: "Film is like a battleground.
Godard includes moments of political discourse, as well as references to his favourite films – Gösta Berling (1924), Johnny Guitar (1954), The Searchers (1956) – and quips about the relation of art to to reality, but his main goal was to make his arrogant cruel bourgeois couple literally go through hell.
And the Liberation Front that kidnaps our heroes uses movie titles as code names in their radio transmissions: The Searchers, Battleship Potemkin, and Johnny Guitar, all Godard favorites from his movie critic days.
There isn’t the tension that one could cut with a knife, nor the kind of diva-ish melodrama courtesy of Joan Crawford in “Johnny Guitar.”
Advertisement
To the extent that the movie is a western at heart, its smartest, subtlest influence is the Joan Crawford classic Johnny Guitar, about a woman who makes her way in the Wild West against all odds, and in the face of all morality.
But the tradition of the ‘chamber western’, a tense chatty story of desperation and entrapment, is long and deep; think of 3.10 to Yuma (1957) Johnny Guitar (1954) or even Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) one of Tarantino’s favourites.
Truffaut playfully employs various filmmaking techniques throughout the picture — for starters, note the iris shot that figures in one sequence — and, true to his roots as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, he amusingly includes a brief scene in which the principals discuss the merits of Nicholas Ray's offbeat 1954 Western, Johnny Guitar.
(Though the great Mercedes McCambridge, from Johnny Guitar and Giant , plays the voice of the possessed Regan.)
Advertisement
In many ways the western form, though indelibly associated with the saddle-weary low-slung machismo of the John Wayne/John Ford collaborations, has always lent itself to strong female roles, whether it’s Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray‘s “Johnny Guitar,” Barbara Stanwyck in Anthony Mann‘s “The Furies” (which actually is a masterpiece) or Anne Bancroft in Ford’s own swan song “7 Women.”
Shown in tight close-up, it's the most authentically exposed bit of on-screen chantoosing since Jeanne Balibar's hypno-drone "Johnny Guitar" in Ne change rien—even if the director rewards it with a bogus exclamation point, cutting away to the tear glistening in Brandon's eye.