Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Johnny Guitar

by Bob Clark

When the perennial auterist magazine Cahiers du Cinema announced its list of the top 100 films late last year, there were controversies and shocks to be found in many avenues—the near-total lack of any films by British directors, unusually high placements for otherwise well-regarded films, and occasionally bizarre choices that seemed to have been picked strictly for the sake of being as obscure as possible. Out of all the highly debated entries, however, there was one picture whose position on the list was unlikely to have surprised anybody, or at least anybody familiar with the passions and prejudices of French critical tastes in the long years following the advent of the New Wave. That film found its place at number 22, with a bullet—Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar.

Now, to find such a small, overlooked studio picture from the 1950’s so high on such an esteemed selection of films, looking down upon such classics as The Godfather, Seven Samurai and 8 ½, can be a little disconcerting, to say the least. However, no matter how much Nicholas Ray’s strange, genre-bending western might’ve gone unnoticed and forgotten in its own country, it has long been championed abroad, and especially in France, as a premier example of Andre Bazin’s auteurist-theory, and an oft-quoted favorite of nouvelle vague spearheads like Jean-Luc Godard. It’s easy to see how it casts such a long shadow over Godard’s obsessive filmography, dropped like so many names at key moments in Pierrot le Fou and Week-End, because like those movies, Johnny Guitar exists in a cinematic world all of its own, with neuroses and contradictions obvious from a first viewing.

Sterling Hayden plays the title character, a down-on-his-luck gunfighter trying to refashion himself as a peaceful man of peace, music and heartbroken promises, but the real protagonist right from the start is Joan Crawford’s Vienna, a wide eyed, bold mouthed saloon keeper with a shady past, a mad vision for the future and an itchy trigger finger for anybody who dares get in her way—a younger, meaner Norma Desmond with a holster tied ‘round her leg like a garter belt. As Hayden and Crawford attempt to rekindle their on-again, off-again acquaintanceship—showing all the love and tenderness of a snake and mongoose squaring off in a ring—they’re caught in a frenzied hunt for a so-called band of killers, the mob-mentality led by the unlikely Mercedes McCambridge, who wants to see Vienna strung up on a noose most all. Throw in a hot-tempered Earnest Borgnine, a healthy heaping of McCarthy-era social commentary and an unflinching eye for violence against innocents, young men and women, and you’ve got yourself a picture.

While a lot of Johnny Guitar can feel a bit outdated more than fifty years later—Crawford and Hayden’s straight-talk express acting styles don’t leave much to the imagination, and can feel a little wooden and unnuanced at times, no matter how little they might need such nuance—the movie shines and succeeds at remaining surprising and confrontational, tackling as many social taboos and genre conventions as it can wrap its arms around. While the blacklist-allegory can be painfully obvious at times, McCambridge herself makes for a fierce and determined villain, her vitriolic stares fueled more by her own unrequited passion for Scott Brady’s “Dancin’ Kid” than any desire for justice, vengeance or good old fashioned bloodlust. Besides dealing frankly with sexual inhibition and jealousy in ways that rise above the creaking soap-and-horse opera conventions, the presence of two bold, determined female figures turns all notions of gender politics squarely upside down. Both of Ray’s women are strong and capable, while his men remain weak-willed and restrained, the title character himself included. Even Ben Cooper’s Turkey practically begs for Crawford’s permission before betraying her to his lynch-mob captors.

Besides the social commentary and Freudian dilemmas of the script and characters themselves, Ray finds unique ways of staging and filming his material that make it stand out from other westerns of the era. The first half-hour in Vienna’s saloon plays out like absurdist, Brechtian theater, with roulette wheels spun just to hear the sound of their spinning, tough talk and hot threats from stairways diffused with the gentle strains of a gunslinger’s guitar-strings and far too many macho posturings, bruised egos and obscured mating rituals to count. Throughout the picture Ray displays a terrific sense of geography, building the story’s progression by staging it at key set-pieces—the explosive mountain passes being dynamited for an incoming railway, Vienna’s sandswept saloon with its half-casino, half-grotto architecture, the wooden bridge where angry ranchers chase their prey and bring them back to hang, and the rocky-trenched silver-mine hidden by the picturesque curtain of a shimmering forest glen waterfall.

Still, long stretches of Johnny Guitar betray a certain kind of cinematic artificiality commonly found in films of the period, but seldom in westerns. Crawford and Hayden wind up spending some of their most evocative moments standing in front of projections and miniatures that make them look like mannequins on display in a diorama from the American Museum of Natural History. Yet even when the film ventures onto patently false sets and backscreens, the psychological mood of interior struggles is only intensified— Francois Truffaut called it the “Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream,” and it’s hard to deny that its leering, Technicolor romanticism stands in stark contrast to the hardnosed, high contrast realism found in westerns of the time.

Ray’s film has more in common with the foggy suburban dreams of Douglas Sirk than the staunch cowboy theatrics of Howard Hawks or John Ford. Only Samuel Fuller and Fritz Lang ever bothered to probe the same psychological depths in the same years, Lang famously calling the western genre the equivalent of his own Germanic Nibelungen—the realm of fantasy and myth. Sergio Leone borrowed the plot-strand of a woman waiting to build a town around a railroad and a gunfighter who names himself after a musical instrument for his own fairy-tale, Once Upon a Time in the West. Pedro Aldomovar stages a tense, surreal scene in the middle of two romantically-tangled actors dubbing lines for the movie in his Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Ray’s influence on Godard’s most casually surreal films is already well-known, and even manages to lend some of its horse-opera mis-en-scene to the mystical space-opera of George Lucas and the backyard nightmares of David Lynch.

As a cinematic skeleton’s key, it more than earns its position on any list of high esteem, and makes a proud, if unusual addition to the canon of the Hollywood western. Skillfully blending reality and its opposite in a way that transcends petty political gambits and gender issues, it literalizes the oft-quoted line from Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”