The Western is the prime political genre, tnyfrontrow writes, and Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar,” from 1954, is one of the greatest Westerns—but its political ideas are hardly the source of its enduring power.
The Western is the prime political genre, and Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar,” from 1954, is one of the greatest Westerns, but its political ideas are hardly the source of its enduring—and controversial—power. What makes the movie is the performances by its lead actors, Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden, which are different in kind from any others that I’ve seen, including by those actors elsewhere.
The exceptional status of its art has also been the cause of exceptional misunderstandings. The movie was a star-driven vehicle: Crawford acquired the rights to the story on which it was based, and she demanded changes to the screenplay in order to make her character the center of the drama. Ray and Yordan, who’d collaborated closely on the script, were forced to rewrite it on the fly, during the shoot.
The movie’s politics are conspicuous and defiant. There are allusions to McCarthyite inquisitions and persecutions and to legalized misrule by the wealthy; there are denunciations of mobs and ambient terror of lynchings. The constant and central politics are gender-based, with men bemoaning their diminished status beside powerful women and women demanding and asserting their equality nonetheless —ultimately leading to a celebrated climactic showdown between Emma and Vienna.
Yet Mr. Guitar, for all his wiles, is, to all appearances, not a gunman—he bears no arms but only, yes, his guitar, which he has deposited on the bar for safekeeping. His way of defusing the imminently violent confrontation has the kind of pulp grandeur that, fused with Hayden’s performance and Ray’s compositions, outleaps its commercial framework to latch onto high-cultural exaltation.
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