Forty Guns
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
In the 1880s, Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) and his brothers Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix) arrive in the town of Tombstone in Cochise County, Arizona. Griff is a reformed gunslinger, now working for the Attorney General's office, looking to arrest Howard Swain (Chuck Roberson) for mail robbery.
Swain is one of landowner Jessica Drummond's (Barbara Stanwyck) forty hired guns. She runs the territory with an iron fist, permitting the town to be terrorized and trashed by her brother, Brockie Drummond (John Ericson), and his boys. Brockie is an arrogant drunk and bully, but he goes too far by shooting vision-impaired town Marshal, Chisolm (Hank Worden), in the leg. Thereupon, Brockie and his drunken friends start trashing the town.
Griff intervenes and pistol-whips Brockie with a single blow while Wes covers him with a rifle from the gunsmith shop. Aware of how close Brockie is to his sister, Griff makes it a point not to crack Brockie's skull. Jessica delivered Brockie when their mother gave birth for the last time.
Wes falls in love with Louvenie Spanger (Eve Brent), the daughter of the town gunsmith, so he decides to settle down and become the town's marshal. Griff becomes romantically involved with Jessica after she is dragged by a horse during a tornado.
Two of Jessica's forty dragoons, Logan (Dean Jagger) and Savage (Chuck Hayward), attempt an ambush of Griff in an alley. He is saved by youngest brother Chico (Robert Dix), who was supposed to be leaving for California for a new life on a farm. Chico's shot kills Savage, after which Jessica's brother and hired guns try to turn the town against the Bonnell brothers.
On his wedding day, Wes is gunned down by Brockie, who is really aiming at Griff (who leans forward to kiss the bride, thereby unknowingly saving himself). Brockie is jailed for the murder. He tries to escape by using his sister as a shield, daring Griff to shoot, and is shocked when Griff does exactly that. Griff's expertly-placed bullet merely wounds Jessica, and the cowardly Brockie then becomes the first man Griff has had to kill in ten years. Brockie's last words are "Mr. Bonnell, I'm killed!"
Chico remains behind to take the marshal's job. Griff rides out, certain that Jessica hates him for killing her brother, but she runs down the dirt street after his buckboard - repeatedly calling out "Griff! Mr. Bonnell!" - and they appear to ride off together for California.

Review: One of them ( Sullivan ) is proclaimed sheriff and his vision from law and justice differs quite of Jessica Drummond and her brother ( John Erikson ), a young gunman eager to take up a life of crime .This is a magnificent Western plenty of violence , hatred ,gun-play, an impossible love story...in a word : emotion , besides it contains effective action sequences as the raid on the small town .
The film has exciting and captivating images as when Barbara Stanwick appears riding in her white stallion with his forty henchmen worn in black and in column( just like Alibaba and the forty thieves from ¨Thousand and one nights¨ book ) and strange images of a dead man on the showcase with the caption : murdered by Bonell brothers and shot in back .
Please consider the latter, because that is how it was presented: in "cinemascope," and you'll want to see photographer Joseph Birac's work in all its glory.For Barbara Stanwyck fans, this might be a little disappointing because Barry Sullivan is the star of the film, not her, despite the billing.
Sullivan plays "Griff Bonnell" and he is the principal figure in the movie, although Stanwyck's presence and character in the story are very strong as "Jessica Drummond." "Griff," along with his brothers, played by Gene Barry and Robert Dix, have more lines than Stanwyck, who doesn't even come on screen until 20 of the 80 minutes have elapsed.
Those include some strange supporting roles, particularly two lawmen who don't sound and act like lawmen: Hank Worden's marshal role in the beginning and Dean Jagger's stint as the sheriff who has designs on Stanwyck.To repeat, this is an odd story.
`Can I touch it?' asks Barbara Stanwyck's cattle queen, presumably referring to Marshal Barry Sullivan's gun.
Fans of more mainstream western movies moseying in from great but chaste works like `My Darling Clementine' or more contemporary cheroot-grinders like `Silverado' will find their expectations seriously challenged.`Forty Guns' gets your attention immediately with a thunderous opening-credit ride-by.
But this is not necessarily a bad thing.In terms of fundamental style, `Forty Guns' is really a 50's TV western jumped up the big board, complete with that genre's trademark, clothes-make-the-hombre ambience.
My powerful heroine had her way in the sack with all forty, then cast them aside for the forty-first "gun", Griff." There are two scenes which are kind of surrealistic, the first at the beginning when you see Barbara Stanwick in a white horse followed by the forty men in dark horses wildly galloping.
Barry Sullivan, Gene Barry and Robert Dix are the three brothers who come to town and get in trouble with John Ericson, Barbara's brother and the sheriff Dean Jagger.Gene Barry falls in love with the beautiful Ziva Roddan.
This movie is one of my favorite Sam Fuller films and for that matter of one Stanwyck's best.
I can't say how long I was looking for "Baron of Arizona." Pleased to say that this one is just as ambitious and fulfilling as the other two that I've seen, "Baron" and "I Shot Jesse James." Barbara Stanwyck is welcome in ANY western film as far as I'm concerned, and Barry Sullivan's "long walk" is the most stylish you'll ever see.
Dean Jagger provides his usual characterization of a conflicted and compromised noble man.Fuller centers the film around a few key scenes, specific confrontations that define the rest of the action surrounding them.
You can sense Fuller's ability to focus his actors that way hanging over both the action and dialog scenes.I'd have to see the film again to really say much about its theme or its subject, but it seems to be in the classic mold of westerns about the end of the "Old West." Stanwyck and Sullivan represent different types of iconic western presence that will depart from the world forever with that ending.The conclusion of the film is a bit underwhelming, but other than that I really have no complaints about this film.
This is the only one I've watched from a handful of Westerns Fuller made - and it's just as individualistic as any of his War films!
Despite the presence of an A-list star in Barbara Stanwyck (past her prime but still extraordinary), at a mere 80 minutes, the film was pretty much considered a second-feature - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, since this very compactness allows it greater focus on the themes inherent in Fuller's script (which are pretty much treated like high melodrama in the rampant style of Anthony Mann's THE FURIES [1950], also with Stanwyck, and Nicholas Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR [1954])!Still, the rest of cast is equally impressive - especially Barry Sullivan (though never quite achieving stardom, he's suitably imposing here as the ageing but steadfast hero and matches Stanwyck every step of the way), Dean Jagger (in a role vaguely similar to the one he played in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK [1955], but with even fewer redeeming qualities) and John Ericson (also from BLACK ROCK, but in a completely different role as Stanwyck's hot-headed younger brother).
You can certainly see, and appreciate, how much a movie like this foreshadowed the spaghetti westerns which have become so famous, but which were made six and more years later.And that's worth remembering, too.
They're right and Forty Guns is no exception.Complex and noirish, with dreamy black and white photography, hard boiled dialog and a bit of sexual innuendo thrown in, Fuller takes pulp fiction and turns it into art, squeezing two-hours of story into a lean seventy-nine minutes.Barry Sullivan was a criminally under-used character actor.
"Forty Guns" (1957) is an excellent Western, directed, produced and written by cult director Samuel Fuller, who made such classics as "The Big Red One" (1980) among others.
The plot of it is unusual, which is about a powerful rancher, played by Barbara Stanwyck, who rules an Arizona county with her private posse of hired guns.
When a new Marshall called Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) arrives to set things straight, the cattle queen finds herself in love with the avowedly non-violent lawman.
The script is more than a little odd, but it does the movie no harm, apart from an annoying happy ending.In conclusion, this is a very different Western than from what was being made at the time with a number of hugely enjoyable stylistic touches.
Barbara Stanwyck (hard as nails) plays a powerful rancher with political ties near Tombstone whose hired hands, mostly crooked and lead by her own brother, bring her together with Barry Sullivan of the U.S. Attorney General's office, out to arrest one of her boys for robbery.
The opening shot of her on a horse with 40 riders, her at the head of the dinner table is like Don Vito Corleone, and her being dragged by a horse in a stunt that very few actors ( let alone women) would try, but that.was Barbara Stanwyck, no stunt woman needed.
The problem with the movie is not enough Stanwyck, and.too much other stuff like the singing of 'Women With A Whip" and awful performances against type by Dean Jagger and Gene Barry.
Sam Fuller's reworking of the Tombstone story, with the Earp family replaced by the Bonnells (Barry Sullivan, Gene Barry and Robert Dix) and the Clanton family replaced by cattle baroness Barbara Stanwyck, her wild younger brother, John Ericson, and forty loyal servants who together run the Arizona town.
From the fantastic opening shots as Stanwyk and her 40 thieves bear down on Sullivan and his brothers, to the numerous murderous shots which come out of nowhere, to the nihilistic pronouncements of all the major characters the overwhelming impression is that all the great modern westerns were paying homage to Forty Guns in a hefty way.
'Woman with a Whip?' That's a song?) and comedy ("I've never kissed a gunsmith before." "Any recoil?") all bundled up into a traditional cowboy tale with lots of steely eyed stares and deliberate walks down a dusty main street, hand clenched near a pistol aching to be drawn.Barbara Stanwyck is tremendous, as always, as the headstrong (was she ever anything else?) ranch owner who ruled a big chunk of Arizona with a delicately gloved fist (wrapped around the riding crop of course).
You know he's a bad seed when he slaps around his beautiful Latina lover for nothing more than disagreeing with him.Her world is challenged by the arrival of a federal marshal with a craggy jaw, a strong moral compass and a nice suit, and his two brothers, who brings law and order, and romantic intrigue to that windswept (and, actually, tornado-swept) corner of the west.There are crooked lawmen, ambushes, fistfights, weddings, funerals, stolen kisses, tumbleweeds, public drinking (and bathing), a strolling minstrel and classic lines – "You seem upset." "I was born upset." Saddle up, this one's a winner.--www.cowboyandvampire.com--.
The film has a complex noir-style plot and was shot in an expressionist black-and-white, even though it was made at a time when colour was increasingly becoming the norm for Westerns.
It also Barry Sullivan as Griff makes a rather stolid hero, but there is a good performance from Barbara Stanwyck, still strikingly glamorous and seductive in her late forties, as Jessica.
The answer, in fact, is that Stanwyck performed the scene herself after her stunt double chickened out!The film was shot in CinemaScope, and Fuller uses the widescreen format to great effect.
For that matter,you'd better pick "run of the arrow" "shock corridor" or "pick-up on south street".Main problem comes from the editing:it seems that a lot of scenes have been cut down (movie running time :scarcely sixty-five minutes)and it makes the story very hard to follow.Add the songs during which there's no action at all,and you get about 55 minutes of plot .An extravaganza with a lot of characters it's difficult to tell apart.Barbara Stanwyck ,who should (and could easily) play a viril woman is subdued most of the time:I urge offbeat westerns afficionados to see "Johnny Guitar" where Joan Crawford and Mercedes MCCambridge are what Stanwick could have been.Invention for some sequences breaks abound,that's the reason why this film deserves to be seen,but not as a whole:the first picture of every James Bond movie has been invented by Fuller,for instance.The bride,screaming over her dead groom recalls William Irish's "the bride wore black'.Spooky noises lead to the discover of a suicide.Stanwyck,having dinner with her forty (or thirty-nine) men,in a sumptuous room which recalls more the court of Vienna than a big ranch,with candlelight and chandelier,and evening gown and crystal clear ,et al..But  as the whole,I say it again,the movie leaves a lot to be desired..
Forty Guns (1957) *** (out of 4) Samuel Fuller's Western about a rancher (Barbara Stanwyck) who travels around with a posse of 'forty guns' but also has her hand in everything but this changes when a new Marshall (Barry Sullivan) shows up.
From the rattling good start with forty horsemen racing with Stanwyck, majestic on her fine white horse, to the very fine shoot out at the end, this is assured and exciting film making all the way.
However, of all the Fuller films, I think the least satisfying are the Westerns--mostly because this genre is too chock full of product and after a while it all starts to look alike.
While a few details here and there are certainly different, there were enough myths and clichés that I consign this to the category of time-passer.The biggest problem I had with the film was Barbara Stanwyck's character, Jessica Drummond.
Long before she became the matriarch of The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck had two other roles as a prairie queen, the first was in The Violent Men and the second in this Samuel Fuller classic Forty Guns.
The title refers to the number of riders, all of whom are handy with a six gun she has on the payroll to enforce her will.Coming to challenge that will is Barry Sullivan who is playing a Wyatt Earp like federal marshal complete with two brothers Gene Barry and Robert Dix. Stanwyck also has a brother, a really vicious punk played by John Ericson.Sullivan's in town to arrest one of Stanwyck's forty who decided to go out on his own and rob a mail coach.
Note how Stanwyck responds to Sullivan who is her enemy on that score as opposed to Jagger who's ready to do all for her if she'll give him the time of day.Forty Guns is a nicely paced very much adult western with some nice double entendre lines neatly placed in the script.
Barbara Stanwyck loved making westerns and this is a real good one..
In 1957 western Forty Guns, Sam Fuller crams an awful lot into an 80 minute runtime; indeed a film whose runtime is double that of its titular digit and whose substance still manages to outweigh some of our more contemporary star dominated genre pictures that are twice, or even three, times as long.
The film is a character piece above all else; a film depicting love coming to a zone dominated by hate, a film depicting the changing of a guard where previously a seemingly unmovable, long standing patriarchy was only ever in force and a film depicting relationships with a bit of sustenance to them where previously there were minions doing dirty work and uneasy sibling allegiances.The film will open with a sweet tracking shot, it will end with a bitter-sweet final composition as two people appear to ride off together – during the middle section, pain; affection and most things in-between bitter and sweet will play out between a handful of people in an Old West town of way-back-when.
In the wagon sit the Bonnell brothers: Wes, Chico and Griff – towards them thunder the titular forty guns, a twice-score of men whose immediate presence strikes us as potentially dangerous but whose presence in the film in relation to these three men will only remain as potentially dangerous out of the actions of its leader.And then there is that leader: a woman, a female character whose presence even appears to startle the camera itself in her reveal – a mixture of surprise and allure as we focus on this distinct, black-clad figure atop a white horse dominating the scene and in charge of those, it appears, who follow her.
Meanwhile, the second of those three Bonnell brothers, in Wes (Barry), strikes up their own relationship with local girl Louvenie – this is before later coming to undertake the role of this now vacant position as a law enforcer.Ultimately, the film's more interesting strand involves its trump card Drummond and its brooding lead Griff, whose nature and set of characteristics, as we witness him essentially 'go up against' Drummond, has us think that if anyone was ever change Drummond, it may very well be him.
Where these two sets of factions meet in the opening scene, as if coming face to face with one another in a 'head on' fashion, Fuller's film is effectively a depiction of each group of persons respective disintegration: Griff and his brothers as these people who arrive in the land looking for someone but end up finding something else and 'The Guns' as a group of people enjoying their power and accepting it at the bereft of a female leader who take against her beginning to put other men before them.
Forty Guns is a good enough western, very much worth to see on the big screen (especially in the kind of case I did, first on a double bill with Johnny Guitar), though I wouldn't put it past genre fans to find better pieces of work.
What he does do differently that another director wouldn't do is inject a very personal, if disguised in genre, kind of style to this story.Some scenes still stick in my head strongly a year after seeing the film just by the visuals of it, how a couple of scenes are shot and edited for an impact only Fuller could produce.
Consequently, these ARE in the main action scenes of the film, involving a man walking down a street against another gunslinger, unstoppable, with Fuller getting the right rhythm with his tracking shot cutting to a stark close-up.
Nothing too wrong with the work by Stanwyck, Fuller, and the other character actors like Barry Sullivan and Dean Jagger, though I'd be lying if I said it was one of the best westerns of the 50's..
Of course this is a Babs Stanwyck picture but surprisingly she doesn't have that much to perform here.At the end of it all I have no idea what Fuller was trying to convey with this western; perhaps it was all just a way of skewering sacred cows and infecting the genre with his own sense of humor.'Forty Guns' is decent but I'd not go out of my way to ever watch it again.
A former gunslinger turned United States Marshall, Griff Bonnell(Barry Sullivan)rides into town with two of his brothers to restore law and order.
Definitely one of the worst westerns ever made, it's even on par with 5 Card Stud.The writing here is absolutely pathetic and you wonder how Stanwyck, Sullivan and others allowed themselves to be in such an awful movie.The 40 Guns has absolutely no relevance here.
Just because it strays from the mold of traditional Westerns doesn't make it a good movie.The film runs 79 minutes and was shot in Arizona.GRADE: C.
If the film were longer it would given more time to properly flesh out all the intricacies of the story.The best part though and this is a spoiler is towards the end when Barbara Stanwyck is taken hostage by one of her own gang.
However, this being a Sam Fuller movie, the character she plays as Jessica Drummond is a long way from that of her later character, Victoria Barkley.
Stanwyck is convincing as the tough woman, and her dialogue exchange with love interest Barry Sullivan over his gun is worth the price of the DVD alone.