Johnny Guitar
Tags: murder, allegory, cult, psychedelic, suspenseful, sadist

Plot synopsis:
On the outskirts of a wind-swept Arizona cattle town, an aggressive and strong-willed saloonkeeper named Vienna maintains a volatile relationship with the local cattlemen and townsfolk. Not only does she support the railroad being laid nearby (the cattlemen oppose it), but she permits "The Dancin' Kid" (her former amour) and his confederates to frequent her saloon. The locals, led by McIvers but egged on by Emma Small, a onetime rival of Vienna, are determined to force Vienna out of town, and the hold-up of the stage (they suspect, erroneously, by "The Dancin' Kid") offers a perfect pretext. Vienna faces them down, helped by the mysterious and just arrived Johnny Guitar. McIvers gives Vienna, Johnny Guitar and "The Dancin Kid" and his sidekicks 24 hours to leave. Johnny turns out to be Vienna's ex-lover and a reformed gunslinger whose real name is Johnny Logan. A smouldering love/hate relationship develops.
The Dancin' Kid and his gang rob the town bank to fund their escape to California, but the pass is blocked by a railroad crew dynamiting a way in, and they flee back to their secret hideout behind a waterfall. Emma Small convinces the townsfolk that Vienna is as guilty as the rest and the posse ride to her saloon. Vienna appears to be getting the best of another verbal confrontation when one of the wounded bank robbers, Turkey, is discovered under a table. Emma persuades the men to hang Vienna and Turkey, and burns the saloon down. At the last second Vienna is saved by Johnny Guitar.
Vienna and Johnny escape the posse and find refuge in The Dancin' Kid's secret hideaway. The posse tracks them down, and the last two of Kid's men are killed by infighting. A halt is called to the bloodbath by the posse's leader, McIvers. Emma challenges Vienna to a showdown; The Dancin' Kid calls to Emma but is killed by a bullet to the head by an angered Emma. Emma then shoots Vienna, but only in the shoulder, where Vienna shoots Emma in the head. The posse allows Johnny and Vienna to leave the hideout in peace, and watches them go.

Review: Except for a few such parts, most of the movie purports itself well and tells an effective story that can be interpreted on several different levels.Mercedes McCambridge playing the demonic sexually repressed Emma Small (again the name makes it too easy for the viewer) stands tall amongst a cast of giants.
Jealousy and rejection guide in her determination, nay obsession, to destroy both her sexual rival Vienna and her unrequited love the Dancin' Kid. Sterling Hayden plays the lead character Johnny Logan aka Guitar to perfection.
The dance song picked by Johnny Guitar that inspired The Dancin' Kid to dance with Emma was "Ol' Joe Clark," a folk ditty, usually played on the fiddle, that was popular during the time period thus adding authenticity to the show..
Seeing it recently I was impressed with the fast pace of the film, the great dialogs, the unusual settings, the incredibly strong presence of Joan Crawford, the hysterical character played by Mercedes McCambridge.
Directed by Nicholas Ray in blazing color, courtesy of Harry Stradling, Jr., it's western featuring the rivalry between two women, Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, as they quarrel over two men, Sterling Hayden and Scott Brady, and shake things up in the Old West, Hollywood style, 1954.
What I like most about Johnny Guitar is the way Joan Crawford's saloon is designed, the undergound cave, the waterfall, the cabin on top of the hill, the moments of intimacy and emotion as they occur in these places, and how the viewer is encouraged to suspend his disbelief of what the story is about and give into his emotions, as the characters give into theirs', and let the devil take the hindmost.
Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) walks into a saloon run by Vienna (Joan Crawford), who is his past love whom he hasn't seen for five years.
Many things has changed since they saw each other for the last time, Vienna turned from a plain saloon singer to its owner, and Johnny Guitar, also known as John Logan, one of the fastest to draw the gun in the West, passed through many tribulations too, but one thing immediately becomes clear as they meet again (`I've waited for you, Johnny') that the major suffering they had to pass through was the solitude, the pain of separation from each other.
Joan Crawford was never so great, and the exchange of poisoned words with McCambridge at the saloon "You haven't got the nerve" , and "If I don't kill you first" on reply to "I'll kill you" by Emma, makes me to smile, as both characters show they wear the trousers rather than the men do.
Weird and hysterical Western with Freudian touches , dreamlike emotionalism and magnificent dialogue in which is blended domination, humiliation and a deadly confrontation ; resulting to be a fascinating and melodramatic film .The ex-prostitute Vienna (Joan Crawford) , a Gambling Saloon keeper, has built a saloon outside of town, and she wishes to make her own way once the railroad is put through, but the villagers want her run out of town and some of them hanged .
Exceptional performances by all casting as top-notch Joan Crawford as gutsy matriarch squabbling over two men , Sterling Hayden as pacifist saddle-tramp who turns a psychopathic temper taking up his pistols and Mercedes McCambridge as nasty and vengeful harpy .
As the Dancin'Kid, Scott Brady is a left-handed-draw, leader of a wild bunch, whose only desire is 'to leave the town so broke.' He tosses a coin into the air, promising Johnny Guitar he'll kill him if it turns out "head." Nicholas Ray will be always remembered for "The Lusty Men," "Run for Cover," "The True Story of Jesse James," and "Johnny Guitar," his first film in color...
Johnny Guitar is a gender drama with obsessive personalities flirting with dementia: the character played by Mercedes McCambridge is unmistakably the main baddie, but Joan Crawford's character is not completely pleasant, grimacing as she does through much of the movie.
Crawford, McCambridge, and definitely Sterling Hayden (one of my all-time favorite 'guy' actors) brought a lot to the entertainment factor of the film.
We see an aging Hollywood queen (Joan Crawford, aged 50[?])desperate to make a movie, any movie, even if it requires dressing up like Black Bart and dragging her heavily varnished Hollywood glamor through the grit and grime of a super hokey western and acting against a leading man (Sterling Hayden) with the talent of a fence post and a converted radio actress (MercedesMcCambridge) chewing the scenery with the ferocity of a blood-crazed shark.If you want to know what the film is about don't ask me.
With Miss Crawford's cultivated MGM accent, her carefully lighted and photographed close-ups and meticulous makeup and hair style the film seems to ask the improbable question, "Can a fading female movie star find love and happiness as the proprietor of a seedy 1800's western saloon?"I suppose it is possible to admire the scenery and vivid cinematography of the film but it is difficult with all the schlock going on in front of it.
In one scene after the bank is robbed, Joan Crawford ("Vienna") and Sterling Hayden ("Johnny Guitar") are riding in a small buggy drawn by a single horse.
Very funny to see.One travesty of this movie is the use of John Carradine - who played such excellent characters, such as Casy in "The Grapes of Wrath" - as a nitwit minor character who echoes the inane statement of Johnny Guitar that 'When you come down to it, all a man wants is a smoke and a good cup of coffee'.
Who thought that audiences wanted to see a Western where gun-slinging outlaws go by none- too-frightening nicknames like Johnny Guitar, Turkey, and the Dancin' Kid?
Traditional gender roles get reversed: Johnny (Sterling Hayden) is a relatively passive hero, while his love interest, saloon-owner Vienna (Crawford) is described as being almost more man than woman.
And there are many campy, laughable moments: the sight of Johnny holding a teacup, Vienna's poufy dress catching on fire, and most of McCambridge's intense performance as the vindictive Emma Small.In some sense, though, the movie doesn't go as far as it could.
Or if the characters' twisted motivations were allowed to unfold naturally, rather than told to us from the start?Watching "Johnny Guitar," you get the feeling that the filmmakers were trying to make a big thematic statement of a kind not usually found in Westerns.
Three Academy-award winning actors (Crawford, McCambridge, and Ernest Borgnine) are among the cast.On this evidence, one would expect `Johnny Guitar' to fall somewhere in that vast middle ground of more-or-less average motion pictures to which we can apply the truism that to some extent people will like them and to some extent they will not, in varying proportions.
Instead, what sets this movie apart from others is how it proves considerably more difficult than expected, according to our usual standards, to say WHICH PEOPLE WILL POPULATE WHICH OF THESE PROPORTIONS.Indeed, there arises from this movie a profound mystery of what it is exactly that `Johnny Guitar' touches in some people that it does not touch in others, a question for which there has been, over the years, no single, compelling answer.If, after watching Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden (`Johnny'), and Mercedes McCambridge star in this Nicholas Ray film, you think that you can guess how a friend, relative, or neighbor would react to it, then you are very likely (MUCH more than ordinarily so .
Too bad, because it was nicely filmed an had an excellent cast with Joan Crawford, Mercedes McCambridge, Scott Brady, Ernest Borgnine, Ward Bond, John Carradine and Ben Cooper.
Johnny Guitar is out of Republic Pictures and is directed by Nicholas Ray. It's written by Phillip Yordan, who adapts from a novel written by Roy Chanslor, and it stars Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Ward Bond, Ernest Borgnine & Scott Brady.Victor Young scores the music, with the theme tune sung by Peggy Lee, and Harry Stradling Senior photographs in Trucolor.
Johnny Guitar, as played by Sterling Hayden, is but a secondary character to Joan Crawford's Vienna in this star-vehicle Western unlike any other.
Movie quote - "I've never seen a woman who was more like a man." Let's face it - With this somewhat off-kilter, 1954 Western being a "Joan Crawford" vehicle - Who do you think was gonna get the juiciest dialogue?
I'll give you exactly one guess who that was.You can be sure that "Johnny Guitar" (I wish this film had been titled something else) was a movie chock-full of hysterical, heavy-duty confrontations where it was the 2 women (not the men) who were clearly running the show.Time & again, it was Crawford, as the dignified saloon-keeper, Vienna, and Mercedes McCambridge, as the lynch-happy rancher, Emma Small, who were at each others' throats like a pair of ravenous vultures heading for the kill.Watching these 2 middle-aged babes go at it was, without a doubt, the crowning highlight of this decidedly "bent" Western.
The absolute venom that was spat out between Vienna & Emma was so outrageously over-the-top at times that, before long, this story began to play out like something of a very twisted parody.All-in-all - "Johnny Guitar" definitely wasn't the best movie of its genre ever made, but, in the long run, it sure did pack one helluva mean-spirited wallop with its honest-to-goodness stab at attempting to reverse the gender roles of your average, 1950's Cowboy B-movie..
I've seen this movie many times and the character of Johnny Guitar is pretty much there from the opening scene to the closing.
She is so incredibly jealous that she would rather see The Dancin' Kid, (Scott Brady) the man she loves and the woman he loves Vienna (Joan Crawford) dead before she can face another day of it.
Vienna is in love with Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) whom she has not seen in five years but misses and loves him even though she has gotten very bitter about men, but with good reason.
Johnny Guitar is probably the most unusual western ever, where female characters are in the center, and the duel between them is the film's most effective sequence.
With the movies main, who its titled after, character Johnny Guitar, Sterling Hayden, coming onto the scene we get a feeling that him and Vienna seemed to have known each other, very intimately, some time ago.
Even though they have no trouble at all stringing up the boy-like Turkey, Ben Cooper, who besides being a member of the Dancin' Kid's gang was also involved in a bank robbery of the towns bank.We also see at the end of the movie with the shooting and bloodshed getting so out of hand that the lynch mob lead by a now almost crazed Emma not having the stomach, with the entire Dancin' Kid's gang rubbed out, to go after both Vienna and Johnny.
This is almost as much a response to the fanatics who have twisted their perception of what this film is as it is a review.I continually read and hear that Johnny Guitar is a camp classic, or that it's one of the all time greats, or that it's loaded with homosexual overtones, that it's not really a western, blah blah blah.
What makes it different from other Westerns is that it has great actors, great color cinematography, and a plot with depth.Joan Crawford stars as a saloon keeper named Vienna.
It's an intelligent, colorful western with a great cast and solid direction from Nicholas Ray. It's a story of a battle of wills between two women - - saloon owner Vienna (Joan Crawford) and rancher Emma (Mercedes McCambridge).
Brought into the struggle between these two is a gang of outlaws led by the Dancin' Kid (Scott Brady), a mob of 'upright citizens' led by rancher John McIvers (Ward Bond), and a guitar-playing gunslinger named -- you guessed it -- Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden).Joan Crawford does a fine job as Vienna.
Also, there are some interesting filming anecdotes describing how both Hayden and McCambridge both hated working with Crawford, with McCambridge battling her off the set as well as on.) "Johnny Guitar" is an entertaining study of mob rule that also upends many conventions of movie westerns, particularly by adding LBGT undercurrents.
No matter, Sterling Hayden was no Dean Martin...Johnny Guitar is everything that could possibly symbolize the best of the Americana westerns of the time.
This is a whole peaceful concept that went on to inspire numerous films not just westerns, and of course, the character of Johnny Guitar definitely had a major influence in the shaping of the character of Harmonica in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.Nicholas Ray is excellent.
Though I don't remembered much from it, I do recall being pretty intrigued by the overall story, rooting for the cowgirl-like character Vienna (Joan Crawford) stand up against an evil gang, led by the nefarious and cold Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge).I remembered Emma Small being a notorious and evil character and provided much of the thrills and suspense in the movie, and seeing Vienna trying to outdo the bad Emma was nothing short of satisfying.Though released in 1954, the movie was filmed in brilliant color and, while the acting may have had its campy moments and the plot could have used more good guy vs.
She has to battle Emma and the townspeople and is helped by her old boyfriend Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden).This was shot as a movie against the witch hunts done in the 1950s for communists.
If you love Joan Crawford's over the top acting and Mercedes McCambridge as an obsessed revenge ridden woman, this is your movie.
Joan Crawford delivers a lesson in how to be a gun-totin' tough-guy cowboy in this famously fascinating bizarro western from Nicholas Ray.And the guys she delivers this particular lesson to need it, because they all either spend their time trying to one-up each other with ineffective macho posturing or stand around wringing their hands and wondering what to do while Crawford and her arch enemy, played as a nun-dressed vicious harpy by Mercedes McCambridge, go at each other with guns blazing.Crawford is saloon owner Vienna, determined to maintain her business even though a lynch mob of townsfolk, led by Emma Small (McCambridge) and the law, want her out.
But either way, the film is indeed fascinating, so much so that it becomes irrelevant whether or not it's any good.Sterling Hayden is Johnny Guitar, formerly Johnny Logan, the guitar-carrying gunslinger who's trying to control his trigger-happy tendencies (how's that for a healthy bit of Freud in your movie?), while Ernest Borgnine plays yet another of his hot-head bad guys who get the crap kicked out of them before the film's end, much to our collective delight.Grade: A.
Joan Crawford, hanging on to her saloon, waiting for the arrival of the railroad, and Mercedes McCambridge, looking absolutely possessed, getting every man in town to follow her to the point of hanging people.
Love is a theme but the women, Vienna played with nerve and steel by Joan Crawford and the impulsive Emma Small by Mercedes Cambridge overshadow the men in the film.
It is Audacious, Different, Quirky, and Quintessentially a Cult Movie, Camp Classic, or an unmitigated Catastrophe, depending on who is doing the Pontificating.What Attracts Viewers and Historians to this Glaring Misrepresentation of the Western is a number of things, one is the Fading Star Joan Crawford taking full Control of the Film Production and Demanding a Singular Voice to its Intent and Outcome.
Yes, the plot is unusual and Sterling Hayden is fine in the male lead but the problem I had in the movie was the role played by Joan Crawford.
When Emma and her acolytes come to hang her,she is sitting in a white dress,playing the piano,against a fire-colored backdrop,she looks like a fallen aristocrat from the court of..Vienna?Sometimes the characters merge in the setting(I'm part of the furniture,one man says).Sometimes everything is black,except for Vienna's and Johnny's faces and their dialogue becomes absolutely sublime.In one scene,Crawford repeats mechanically Johnny's words,then,a second time,with more feeling you'll ever know(Yes,I was waiting for you)What makes this western unique is the antagonism between the two women.
(Every dramatic line in this film seems Really Announced in a way that is quite dated.) I'll take Holly Hunter as the Joan Crawford character Vienna, Nicole Kidman as the sexually frustrated Emma Small, and Russell Crowe (who actually can play guitar) as Johnny Guitar.
Joan crawford had some really good lines, like when she explains Emma's hatred to Johnny.
As boss of her own saloon bar, Joan Crawford stuns as Vienna, delivering her lines like silver bullets, flanked by the enigmatic Sterling Hayden as outsider Johnny Guitar, and Mercedes McCambridge as the intense and twisted small-town grandee, Emma Small.
The film is melodramatic, even campy.Sterling Hayden is Johnny Guitar who is hired to protect Joan Crawford (Vienna) his past lover.
Since the backstory of the making of JOHNNY GUITAR is rife with reports of the feud between McCambridge and Crawford, this adds a special dimension to their tense moments on screen.There are good performances from ERNEST BORGNINE, BEN COOPER, JOHN CARRADINE and others and special mention must be made of the fact that there are high class Grade A production values in this film coming from a poverty row studio like Republic.Admirers of Joan Crawford will likely be among the film's biggest fans.
Cast with Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden backed by then veterans John Carradine and Ward Bond, and new coming star as Mercedes McCambridge, is one the best characteristics of this classic western, which reflects the lives of several people competing for power with violence.
Joan Crawford plays the role of a strong-willed saloon owner in a small western town.
In 1954, Ray directed the western film Johnny Guitar, which starred Joan Crawford.