Johnny Guitar (1954)

 Nicholas Ray's "Johnny Guitar"


What's ironic about Nicholas Ray's 1954 western "Johnny Guitar" is that the titular character isn't the most compelling and central character in the story. That honor belongs to the Joan Crawford's Vienna. While it's not that revelatory that Crawford would be the most intriguing presence in a film, it is somewhat out of the ordinary for a western's central conflict to revolve around two women. 

In the story, Vienna owns a saloon on the outskirts of an Arizona cattle town. Her relationship with the townsfolk is tedious, to put it lightly, as her entrepreneurial ambitions threaten local power player Emma Small. When a  group of lawless hooligans who frequent Vienna's saloon are suspected of holding up a stagecoach, it becomes the perfect pretext to force Vienna out of town due to her association with their ringleader, 'The Dancin' Kid.' Enter Johnny Guitar, a reformed gunslinger and Vienna's former lover. The rest of the film unfolds in a series of conflicts between the various factions, with repeated attempts to have Vienna arrested and hanged.

If you take the typical format of a western, that being the "Tabula Rasa" exercise by John Locke, it explores the dynamics of individualism and how that takes shape in the blank slate of the "old west." Because there is such a blank slate to intact will in this landscape, the interactions between characters becomes a moral and political battle. More specifically in "Johnny Guitar," this battle seems to have nothing to do with morality. Rather, it has everything to do with power. The openness of the old west provides the room to exert the will to power over the landscape and its resources. While the men are engaged in conflicts driven by ego and bravado, the women battle on a much grader scale - economic control. This central conflict encapsulates the growing forces of capitalism and expansionism in the American West, as individuals colonize the land for their own financial and political interests.

"Johnny Guitar" - being more than meets the eye -  captured the attention of more than just American audiences and critics, who weren't exactly keen on the film to begin with. In France, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, then writing for Cahiers du Cinema, were enamored by the film and felt that the beauty and extravagance of the film's visual imagery made the film more poetic than the typical western. Truffaut even called it "a Western dream" and referenced the film in many of his own works. 

Personally, I feel that "Johnny Guitar," while still maintaining its western pulp appeal, captivates with its constant power struggles between characters. As mentioned earlier, the American Old West serves as battleground for individual plays at power. The characters in "Johnny Guitar" are all driven by self-interest, and their conflicting desires create relentless drama. It's an exciting film - perhaps one of the sharpest Westerns of the 1950s.



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