Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon worker who wears pants, carries guns, and rejects feminine submission. She is saddled with ambition grounded in Manifest Destiny, awaiting the railroad that will convert her land into capital. Meanwhile, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) leads a lynch mob against Vienna, fueled by jealousy disguised as civic righteousness. Through tilted angles and operatic closeups, Johnny Guitar abandons classical Western framing for expressionist frenzy, revealing how the genre’s masculine mythologies always contained their own subversion. In this deconstruction of the traditional Western, gender roles implode, yet McCarthyist paranoia bleeds through every frame, and westward settlement continues to drive its characters’ inner motivations. 1954, US, 35mm, 111 min.
Part of Cinema Revived: Timeless Selections from the Vault, an ongoing presentation of notable feature-length films from the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
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Bio
Nicholas Ray, described by the Harvard Film Archive as “Hollywood’s last romantic” and “one of postwar American cinema’s supremely gifted and ultimately tragic filmmakers,” was considered an iconoclastic auteur director who often clashed with the Hollywood studio system, but would prove highly influential to future generations of filmmakers. His best-known work is the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean. Between 1947 and 1963, he made many narrative features, including They Live by Night (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Bigger Than Life (1956), and King of Kings(1961), as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s, We Can’t Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray’s death. Ray was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard writing in a review of Bitter Victory, “… there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.”
Accessibility, Content, and Sensory Notes
Content note: This film contains violence, including gunfire and hanging.
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