JOHNNY GUITAR
Joan Crawford’s western classic is still in tune.
OATER WITH THE MOST STILL DAZZLES…
JOHNNY GUITAR PG FILM EXTRAS
1954 OUT NOW BD
EXTRAS Commentary, Introductions, Interview, Video essays, Limited edition book
Digitally restored for Blu-ray, this delirious mid-’50s westerncum-melodrama is directed by Nicholas Ray, a filmmaker with a fascination for anguished misfits and disillusioned outsiders. Made for the minor Hollywood studio Republic, it emerged in an era when the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch-hunts had rocked the industry.
Johnny Guitar does draw on some generic conventions: there are shootouts and chases on horseback, outlaw gangs and vengeful posses. Yet Ray and screenwriter Philip Yordan also tear up the rulebook by making the traditionally male hero a gun-toting, cross-dressing woman named Vienna (an imperious Joan Crawford), who incurs the fury of locals led by the jealous Emma (Mercedes McCambridge). Riding into town to assist Vienna is her nomadic former lover (Sterling Hayden), the titular guitarist.
A baroque, dreamlike atmosphere is achieved via oversaturated colours, stylised interiors and painted backdrops, alongside the mannered dialogue and deliberately excessive performances. Plentiful extras pay tribute to the film’s visual and thematic richness, with an array of interpretations, be they psychoanalytical, socio-political, mythical or proto-feminist. Nearly seven decades on from its original release, the fundamental strangeness of Ray’s extravagant fable still blazes brightly. Tom Dawson