Every Little Thing I Adore About 'Johnny Guitar'

From the first moment I saw Johnny Guitar, in the early hours of some abandoned night out in my second year of university, it had me. Its one-liner fusillade of a screenplay that’s cleverer than it seems- its gloriously lengthy opening sequence totally comfortable in its own sense of time- and its larger-than-life characters all feeling smaller than we could possibly know.

Johnny Guitar was rejected by its native audience but adored across the pond in Europe, particularly by the French film critics who would go on to be the vanguard of the Nouvelle Vague- and while the film’s subtle cocktail of film poetry with a pulp punch was clearly influential, one of the things the New Wave-ers missed was its cracked, unshakable and utterly sincere heart…

Just the way movies used to be ‘allowed’ to start. When revisiting the Universal Monster Classics in my first week at uni like the wonderful ‘Dracula’ and ‘The Invisible Man’ I was so endeared to how abruptly they ended, with no concept of how bluntly their credit crawls would be seen in the decades to come. In this case, Nicholas Ray punches us into his movie right from the first shot- with a lone rider watching a mountain be blown in half. No exposition, no warning, it’s almost played like an everyday occurrence- and why the hell not?

The stage driver jumping off to check on his gutshot friend the second the robbers turn tail.

Johnny’s white mare with jet black hair. Great choice.

The roulette worker cheerfully spinning the wheel as Johnny walks in, without a word. Such an old Hollywood detail.

Sterling Hayden as Johnny Guitar: Quick but bruised, always slouching under his height, dressed to kill without a six-gun in sight. The role was written as a killer suffocating in the shadow of his past and Hayden- who always looked like a man’s man who’d gone ten rounds with the best and only ever saw the stars around his head- was absolutely perfect for the part.

First off: The cheeky subjective nature of this shot. He’s railing off a little colourful exposition about Vienna but the POV-esque angle makes it so disarming. Secondly: The subtle attention Ray pays to establishing this space. We spend a lot of time in this bar and the handheld follow-ons, slow pans and deep focus wides really sketch the whole joint out in my mind.

Eddie’s wry smile up at Vienna after she asks him to spin the wheel, just for its sound. Like I say, the dynamics between these characters are established so playfully- it’s a delight.

Joan Crawford strapping on a gunbelt to meet her potential makers. Way back in 1954 this film captured a confidence about shattering gender roles in media so much today fails to understand: You kill them with the certainty of silence. Cramming in clunky lines pre-built for Tumblr quotes is like writing an essay on why your bigger stick is better- and this image says more than all those words ever could.

The mob throwing a corpse right onto a dice table. The stakes are at their boiling point from the get-go, and it’s almost like the film patiently traces a noose of sulphur in tangles around its own feet before there’s no more room left to run.

Vienna quietly, sincerely lamenting the loss of Emma’s brother. Such a human moment.

“Down there I sell whiskey and cards. All you can buy up these stairs is a bullet in the head.” Every singly line of this deliciously melodramatic conversation is a sparkling delight. There’s something to be said for having conviction enough to play sharp, hammy dialogue like its pure gold. Maybe the only real difference is in delivery.

Johnny re-entering the scene almost ten minutes after we last saw him with this wicked-quick glass spin. Also this slowly rolling/falling glass as a transition is something we’d see Andrei Tarkovsky, of all people, perfect a few years later.

And the look on his face- almost right in the lens!

The way Johnny so earnestly defuses the tension.

John Carradine (father of David, who you may know as Uma Thurman’s least favourite Bill) in all his warm, sun-bleached wonder.

Johnny framed just above Vienna’s shoulder, a hazy blur, while the Kid tries to chat her up.

The way Vienna & Johnny’s romance so naturally bleeds into the film’s quiet mockery of Western tropes. Their easy chemistry picks apart the Kid’s cliché tough-guy one-liners with devious grace.

Ray returning us to this shot when Johnny is now at her side, singing a song from their old days. He’s gone from the frame. As alive as their love still is, there’ll always be that emptiness lurking in the memory.

The Kid nodding to Bart so he leaves his guns for a fight with Johnny. It’s a little moment but I’ve always felt its less about avoiding more trouble- and more a sign of respect for the gui-tar man.

Bart sucker-punching Johnny the second they’re out of sight.

“I always wanted to shoot me a guitar man.”

These raw, handheld snippets of coverage from the fight. Such a gutsy, ahead-of-its-time choice for 1954.

This staging. Again a great way of punching the set into our heads.

The haunted, emasculated, frightened look on Sterling Hayden’s face after Johnny shoots for the first time in a long time. Vienna’s not the only one afraid of what he can do…

The way Joan Crawford is occasionally shot just out of focus throughout the film. In a strange way it almost makes her even bigger.

Ray’s careful, sparing use of negative space really hits when he lets it creep in- and the way he so rarely allows Vienna and Jonny’s faces to share the same frame.

A friendly, wonderful reminder that Johnny Guitar just spent almost its first 40 straight minutes in Vienna’s saloon. I’m a big lover of extended sequences and this is as big, earnest and unapologetic as they come.

Not just the sublime Ernest Borgnine, but the whole crew: Archetypical goons paid enough time and care to become bigger than a genre their fates are, at the same time, tragically trapped in.

Composition- and the fact that only after a few minutes we’re right back in Vienna’s saloon. It’s almost as if the screenplay is structured by the same set of scales its stakes sit on: The more time we spend outside, the more the outside is creeping in- with a torch in its hand to burn the whole thing down.

“Tell me something nice.” “What do you want to hear?” “Lie to me.”

The darkness clawing at their reunion. There’s something so fascinating about watching characters trying to escape a path they know the film has already written at their feet.

This incredibly obvious (but still very pretty) backdrop. With all the genre-pranking he’s been doing I really wonder if Ray did this as a gag.

How completely Crawford & Hayden’s flamboyant performances sell this little scene set against the most obvious bluescreen you ever done seen.

The way we cut between these shots without a second breath. Yet again Ray’s comfort using the abrupt extremes of the time as stylistic flourishes is irresistible.

…Particularly the way he banks the crux of their tragic romance on this one sham of a screen: As hammy in appearance as any of the firebrand dialogue that populates it- and equally doomed to the same fate as its miserable lovers. The only thing keeping the ghost of their love alive is their words- so of course they had to be burned into bluescreen. What a profound, bravado piece of film-making.

I was going to again comment on how excellently the film cast its one-and-done faces, then saw just how committed the crew were to having distinctive looking bit-parts when this man opened his mouth and a Southern twang so poorly dubbed it would make the Italians blush drawled out of his mouth. Is that a time-travelling piece Western parody…?

How genuinely vile, and in turn sad, Emma’s character is.

This image, and Vienna playing the melody for a song only she- and we- know is special.

The posse discovering Turkey’s bleeding body- and in doing so tossing Vienna’s model of her future town to the floor. Its on the nose- but works superbly because Ray doesn’t draw an ounce of attention to it.

Joan Crawford’s face settling, for the first time in the film, when she tells Turkey to sacrifice her for his life.

Note how swiftly the pulpy camp of Johnny Guitar has mutated into a truly nasty beast. It dresses this horrible story of a black-hearted town so down it’ll break its own laws to snuff out a strangers’ dreams in endearing Hollywood charm- then snaps the latch off its jaws and let the true horror of that situation swing hold in the final act. It punches square in the gut precisely because of the hammy skin it’s dancing in- and in doing so doesn’t just take on the genre, but the whole Fordian industry it’s emerged from.

“This isn’t my idea Vienna.” Honestly, what a nightmare.

On the lighter side: How much the little snippet of score over this shot reminds me of The Jungle Book- a tape I watched with my wonderful Grandpa, and wound back every time, once a week for years when I was growing up.

Plus the way Sterling Hayden awquardly puts his hands up in little stages always makes me lose it.

The fact this is Francois Leterrier, who two years later starred in Robert Bresson’s ‘A Man Escaped’ (I promise).

“You ever know anyone to take a hanging easy?”

The way the film treats Johnny’s skill with a gun as a hideous reversal of every other fast-draw Western star. (for another superb example, see Henry King’s masterful ‘The Gunfighter’)

The fact a posse of 30 armed men wouldn’t run in against four bandits, an unarmed woman and a guitarist and instead wanted them to tear eachother apart. Just another insidious layer.

Joan Crawford, just casually pulling this look off.

I think a quote that really hits Johnny Guitar’s hammer home is “The trouble with us Americans is that we always want a tragedy with a happy ending.” Though this final, romantic resolution with the sweeping score and crashing water might be seen as a joyful ending- think about the circumstances. The town have successfully seen Vienna’s saloon burned to the ground and watched the Kid’s gang rip itself to pieces. Johnny and Vienna are together again, as the melody that has haunted them both the entire film breaks out into song- but more as the siren they just can’t defy: A well-meant but destructive romance that could last, and grow- but might also draw them in the same ruinous circle we’ve just witnessed. The waterfall might be cascading, the scenery might be beautiful, the music might finally be swooning- but they’re burying their faces away from the whole rotten sham. An out-and-out masterpiece.