Johnny Guitar

 

Director Nicholas Ray

Ray with Joan Crawford

Crawford (left) with Mercedes Cambridge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHNNY GUITAR         A                                                                                                             USA  (110 mi)  1954  d: Nicholas Ray

Never seen a woman who was more of a man.  She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me feel like I’m not.    —Sam (Robert Osterloh), one of the blackjack dealers

Easily Nicholas Ray’s most subversive film, coming after They Live By Night (1948),  In a Lonely Place (1950), and On Dangerous Ground (1952), doing well at the box office but trashed by the critics, completely misunderstood at the time, refusing to conform to expectations of the male-dominated Western genre, which is typically an amalgamation of racism, sexism, and xenophobia, viewed by Ray as the biggest failure of his career, a continuance of his brooding outsider theme while also an indictment of mob psychology.  Conceived as a blatant response to the Hollywood blacklist and the witch hunt period of McCarthyism, this was a Cold War-era pursuit of men and women who were accused of being communists, most were falsely accused and imprisoned, their livelihoods and careers ruined by men who blatantly pushed the conspiracy theories of the day, yet the film’s reputation has been resuscitated by Martin Scorsese and other film scholars, beloved in Europe, including François Truffaut, who hailed Ray as “the poet of nightfall,” describing this film as “the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns,” listed at #9 for best picture in 1955 from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Cahiers du Cinema: 1951-2011, with many now praising this as among Ray’s best work.  Based on a 1953 novel by B-picture screenwriter Roy Chanslor, with a script largely credited to Philip Yordan, though blacklisted writer Ben Maddow may have contributed, heavily revised by Ray, it was written for Joan Crawford, who bought the rights for the movie, basically the producer for her own picture, the one calling the shots, often altering the script to suit her, with Crawford at the time an aging film star who grew paranoid about her fading career, constantly making demands that only heightened her insecurity, where there was constant friction on the set between her and her leading man, Sterling Hayden, with Crawford calling him “the biggest pill in Hollywood,” while Hayden exclaimed, “There is not enough money in Hollywood that could lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford.  And I like money.”  Yet within this cauldron of Hollywood combustion and turmoil lies a truly magnificent script, among Hollywood’s greatest poetry, as the dialogue is crisp and fiercely antagonistic, filled with shots and counter shots at one another, where this is the epitome of a town that’s not big enough for the two competing interests, with Joan Crawford as Vienna representing the new world dream of the railroad, hoping to cash in on the future, and Mercedes Cambridge as Emma Small representing the old world of cattle interests, where they don’t believe in fences or anything restricting the far reaches of vast and unlimited lands.  Vienna even has a miniature model of a town in her saloon, destined to become a railroad stop, referenced by Sergio Leone when he created Claudia Cardinale’s character in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968).  Subverting the Western as a male vehicle, Nicolas Ray pits two women against one another, both detesting the other, with the film seething with their outright contempt, becoming an eroticized antagonism, with both distinguishing themselves in the roles, while Hayden as Johnny Guitar serves as the love interest, a role usually reserved for a woman, yet his pretty boy image is mocked by his direct and straightforward approach, standing up to any man, though often from the shadows.  Due to the camp nature of the film, wildly flamboyant with exaggerated stereotypes and operatic melodrama, some may question the feminist intent, but that’s the baffling nature of the film, examining the costs of a woman’s independent action through lurid, violent exaggeration, where Vienna isn’t willing to sacrifice her autonomy for Johnny, and just as surprisingly, he never asks her to.  Described as “a revisionist western, a feminist polemic, a vibrant fairy tale, a subversive cold war parable, maybe even a queer cult classic, ReFramed No. 23: Nicholas Ray's 'Johnny Guitar' (1954),” it has a beloved stature in the gay community (who loved to do Crawford in drag), openly embraced for how it has undermined the sexual roles, leaving audiences confused at the time of its release, with Vienna bitterly reminding Johnny, “A man can lie, steal, and even kill, but as long as he hangs on to his pride, he’s still a man.  All a woman has to do is slip – once, and she’s a ‘tramp!’  Must be a great comfort to you to be a man.”  There are also lesbian undercurrents, with Emma having a delusional fantasy about the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), yet her real interest, it seems, is Vienna, yet the sentiment is not reciprocated, which only leaves her more incensed, subconsciously repressing that interest and wanting her dead if she can’t have her.  It’s a strange alignment of stars, certainly among the most mysterious of all Westerns, yet it has all the standard conventions, a stagecoach holdup, a bank robbery, a hired gun, a posse turned into a lynch mob, a villain’s lair, a barroom brawl, a woman with a past, and a kid trying to prove himself.  Hayden’s tough guy persona is used to brilliant effect, as he doesn’t carry a gun, carrying a guitar on his back instead, introducing himself as a disinterested bystander at one point, “I’m a stranger here myself,” completely confounding the outlaw gang who don’t know where he stands, making the barroom confrontation even more wonderful, as the standoff isn’t with guns but with words, a delightful turn of events, and the rapid-fire dialogue doesn’t disappoint, ever more mythologized over time, endlessly quoted and repeated, including his maxim for living, “When you boil it all down, what does a man really need?  Just a smoke and a cup of coffee,” a line that diffuses armed conflict from escalating. 

The last film shot on Trucolor, a highly saturated two-strip, red and blue process, much of it shot in some stunning outdoor landscapes of Sedona, Arizona by Harry Stradling Sr, while other scenes were filmed near Oak Creek Canyon between Phoenix and Sedona, where the rocks have a reddish tint, yet Crawford refused to subject herself to the desert setting, so all her outdoor close-ups were actually shot in studio, using a double for long shots.  Shot at Republic Pictures, Ray’s first after leaving RKO, a smaller low-budget studio known primarily for B-movies that was a step down from Crawford’s days as the glamorous star at MGM and then Warners, so she let Ray and everyone else on the set know it, making their lives a living hell with temper tantrums and constant demands for more scenes and close-ups, even attempting to sabotage actress Mercedes Cambridge, bullying her on the set while ripping her costumes to shreds, thrown along the side of a highway in a drunken spree.  Ray reportedly vomited several times before arriving to work each day, as the heightened tension working with Crawford was unbearable.  Not like any other cowboy drama, playing havoc with Western conventions while reveling in sexual role-reversals, where in the middle of it all is Victor Young’s enchanting musical score, Ray sets his film shortly after the Civil War, taking place outside a fictitious town of Red Butte, Arizona (identified by the bank), as a stranger wanders into town by the name of Johnny Guitar, but along the way he witnesses a stagecoach robbery from high above a mountain vista, unable to see details, while all around them explosions are going off to make way for the coming railroad.  Entering town is like entering a dream, arriving during a sandstorm, where all you can make out is the name of the saloon, Vienna’s, with a casino inside, yet it is eerily empty, with no customers, yet the barkeep and dealers are all eyeballing the man who walked in out of a storm, discovering Vienna, now the owner, is a former saloon hostess, with short cropped hair, dressed entirely in black boots, pants and shirt, with dark red lipstick, yet carrying a holster, just like a man.  Seen early on having a business meeting with a railroad executive, she more than holds her own, viewed as a domineering force who is defiantly self-reliant, even barking out orders in her low voice to her casino workers, yet this establishment is peculiarly built right into a rock, which accounts for some of the jagged walls.  The leisurely pace of the opening is interrupted by the arrival of an angry mob led by Emma, including John McIvers (Ward Bond), a cattleman mayor, Marshal Williams (Frank Ferguson), and a motley group of men, providing a dead body as evidence, calling out for Vienna to be charged with the murder of her brother in the stagecoach robbery, though no evidence points to her.  Emma claims it was done by the Dancin’ Kid gang, friends of Vienna, claiming she’s harboring a gang of criminals and needs to be run out of town.  Vienna starts out on the top of the stairs, eyeballing the group, calmly proclaiming her innocence, indicating “Down there I sell whiskey and cards.  All you can buy up these stairs is a bullet in the head.  Now which do you want?”  But when Emma makes it personal, making threats, she walks down the stairs, with Emma warning, “I’m going to kill you.”  Vienna answers, “I know.  If I don’t kill you first.”  And therein lies the dramatic theme, radiating a persistent anxiety about change, as the two protagonists are dead set in their intentions, both fiercely independent, yet stubbornly persistent.  Emma’s hysteria is matched by Vienna’s calm restraint, never backing down, but holding her own against heavily stacked odds.  McIvers gives her and her ilk 24-hours to get out of town if they want to avoid trouble, an ultimatum at odds with the Marshal’s law, but he means business, with threats setting the stage for future hostilities.  In the midst of this showdown in the saloon, Johnny distinguishes himself as the only man without a gun, yet his calmness and good humor belies the situation, egged on by Bart (Ernest Borgnine), one of the Kid’s gang, and the two get to tussling, mostly happening offscreen, as the camera stays on Vienna and the Kid, who stand around a blackjack table discussing their feelings, returning to the fight only when it’s over, a forgettable brawl of no consequence whatsoever, with Johnny beating him senseless.  While no one says it out loud, this stranger seems surprisingly at ease, appearing out of nowhere, raising the question, “Who is this guy?”  Johnny and Vienna have a history together, yet broke it off five years ago, with Vienna calling him back as hired protection, yet her underlying motivation is to rekindle that love affair.  She hides her feelings, however, behind the bravado of the brawl, with each dancing around the inevitable, creating a mysterious ballet of emotional standoffishness, yet then instantaneously they apparently reconnect, awakening the next morning with their relationship reassured.  Vienna has some unfinished business, making a withdrawal from the bank to pay off her staff, as she’ll be closing down.  But they’re met by the Kid and his gang, who are there to rob the bank, thinking so long as they’re run out of the premises, they’ll at least have some traveling money.  While the timing couldn’t be more peculiar, the outlaw escape is equally harrowing, as they head into the mountains at the same time as dynamite explosions are closing down the pass, making the crossing impossible, returning to their hideout tucked away from it all, perched atop a mountainous rock, yet completely out of sight behind a waterfall, with the anxious men seething in anger and discontent.

While this is a Joan Crawford picture, Mercedes Cambridge steals the show as a raving psychopath, insanely over-the-top, serving as the town instigator, stirring the men into a frenzy, underscoring the men’s sheepishness, quickly forming a posse headed by McIvers (which mirrors Ward Bond’s anti-communist role in spearheading the McCarthy attacks), but she spurs them on at every turn chasing after the Kid and his gang, banishing Vienna from town, and even worse, instilling the men with a lynch mob hysteria, veering into territory explored by Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), where ordinary citizens can be bullied into a psychotic rage, completely transformed into a communal bloodlust for killing.  While McIvers is the man in charge, she is the pathological force that actually drives this picture, playing an unforgettable role of pure evil incarnate, getting a maniacal reaction after torching Vienna’s business and burning it down, and while the community may be responsible for carrying out a hanging, she goads them all along the way, pushing them further and further into following their worst instincts, crossing the line into criminality and even murder.  The half-crazed, pathological mania behind her neurotic vengeance is at the heart of the picture, standing for the ruthlessly corrupt power behind the McCarthy hearings, whose rigid standards are driven by a delusionary, Puritanical repression, matching Emma’s own deeply repressed sexual identity, with Vienna explaining that the Kid “makes her feel like a woman, and that frightens her,” instead instilling a poisonous venom over every frame of the film.  Identity fluctuates throughout this picture, as Vienna changes from pants to dresses (butch to femme), Johnny goes from being unarmed to wearing a gun, Johnny has changed his name, while Vienna has changed her profession.  Moreover, the Kid and his gang are charged for a stage holdup they didn’t commit, Vienna is repeatedly charged with masterminding crimes she had nothing to do with, while her sexual role from male to female also fluctuates with the costume she wears.  She is financially independent, owning her own business, and is always in control of her relationships, whether it be with the Kid or Johnny, always choosing the man she wants rather than be chosen by them.  Meeting an angry lynch mob in her saloon after the bank robbery, she’s alone in a cavernous saloon wearing a flowing white dress of innocence, seen calmly playing a sad song on the piano, an astonishing yet remarkably unforeseen image with the interior rocks adding an eerie backdrop, but when the vicious mob overruns her claim of guiltlessness, she’s hauled off for a hanging with her saloon gleefully burned down by Emma.  The lynch mob possesses evil intent, consumed on getting vengeance, browbeating a terrified kid into implicating Vienna (pressuring many well-known actors and directors into naming names is precisely what was so heinous about the McCarthy hearings), promising him immunity, but breaking every promise they make, hanging him anyway while Vienna is gallantly rescued by Johnny with the noose still around her neck, a last second reprieve from the gallows’ rope.  A figure of female power in a traditionally male-dominated West, she maintains her composure even after her business is burned to the ground, viewed as a rugged, tough individual, an equal in every respect to Johnny Guitar, or any other man, switching back into pants afterwards, easily exuding both masculine and feminine traits, but what’s missing is any sense of vulnerability or female mystique, where any romance is more suggestive than real or visibly expressed onscreen.  While Mildred Pierce (1945) breathed new life into Crawford’s flagging career, this film coincided with a downturn in her star status, where the exaggerated fever dream of this film only heightened a prevailing view of her as camp.  Figuring into this public descent was Crawford’s open attack on Marilyn Monroe’s flaunted sexuality, which she likened to a “burlesque show” unsuitable for the screen, claiming her films weren’t doing any business.  The story was a sensation in Hollywood, with most defending Monroe, who would, of course, become a huge box office star, while Crawford was viewed as an over-the-hill actress whose star had faded, openly revealing her jealousy of Monroe’s quick ascent into the Hollywood mainstream.  Even during the filming of this film, the press viciously attacked her, claiming her behavior on the set was unprofessional, accused of bullying Mercedes Cambridge, with Sterling Hayden echoing that thought, so her personal life matches a character that hates all other women, viewing them all as rivals, which greatly accelerates her exaggerated view as camp.  The finale, however, really tops it off, where there is an inevitable shootout between the two female stars, taking place at the outlaw hideout, while the men are reduced to secondary characters who simply watch it all happen, but the film begins and ends with Johnny, elevated to an intoxicating degree with a lover’s kiss in front of a waterfall to Peggy Lee’s wistful and melancholic rendition of the final theme song, Johnny Guitar (Title Song) YouTube (3:11), singing “There was never a man like my Johnny, like the one they call Johnny Guitar,” as if the entire film has been narrated by her.  Out of nowhere, viewers are reminded that the title of the film is in name only, as Crawford is the one wearing the pants and pushing all the buttons.  Described as part fatalism, part romanticism, the cinema of outsiders and loners, and also the cinema of gun fighting women, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described this as the “first existential western.” 

Martin Scorsese introduces Johnny Guitar (USA, 1954) dir. Nicholas Ray YouTube (3:27)

The Killing

Director Stanley Kubrick on the set

Kubrick with Sterling Hayden

Kubrick sandwiched between Kola Kwariani (left) and Sterling Hayden

Kubrick (left) with Vince Edwards and Marie Windsor

Sterling Hayden with Marie Windsor

THE KILLING          A                    

USA  (83 mi)  1956 d:  Stanley Kubrick

The film that put Kubrick on the map, released by the studio as the second film in a double-feature, shot in just 24 days on a B-movie budget of only $320,000, elevated from the forty thousand he had to work with to film KILLER’S KISS (1955), but a flop financially, yet critics acknowledged a spectacular young talent, and the first Kubrick film to be adapted from another source.  The director was particularly impressed by the time structure in Lionel White’s 1955 crime thriller Clean Break, as White was the master of the heist gone wrong novel.  Even after 60 years, this is still a perfectly conceived film classic, a 50’s black and white film noir suspense thriller with voiceover narration and an unusual overlapping time structure that goes back and forth in time, starring Sterling Hayden at the top of his game as the bold and brash ringleader Johnny Clay, the recently released ex-con who plans a perfect heist at the Lansdowne Racetrack for $2 million smackeroos (actually shot at the Bay Meadows Racetrack just outside of San Francisco), assembling a five-man team of novices, an oddly devised collection of outsiders and luckless misfits, all driven by a desperate craving for money as the answer to all their prayers, where the ingenious scheme is carried out perfectly in a tightly planned time schedule until, little by little, everything unravels.  There is terrific dialogue written by Kubrick and Jim Thompson (who felt cheated over his secondary “additional dialogue” credit, claiming he wrote most of the screenplay), great acting from a collection of B-movie standouts, loaded with suspense and atmosphere, as well as huge doses of humor, and while it’s beautifully realized by the constant handheld camera movement of cinematographer Lucien Ballard who actually got his start working with Josef von Sternberg in the mid 30’s, eventually working with Sam Peckinpah, shooting The Wild Bunch (1969), mostly shot in and around Los Angeles, there were severe disagreements between the 27-year old director and the camera crew, as Kubrick was insistent upon adhering to his own compositional vision, shooting the aftermath of the shootout scene himself, which Martin Scorsese may have had in mind in Taxi Driver (1976).  The ingeniously complex narrative structure feels like a flashback film, yet there are no flashbacks, as the story is simply told out of order, with the dry voice of a narrator providing a 3^rd person newsreel style accounting of what’s taking place in each sequence, recalling the March of Time newsreels that Kubrick directed, specifying the exact time of the action, transmitting expository information, keeping viewers detached from the central drama, giving the film a documentary style depiction, each segment feeling like a story within a story.  The first few sequences are particularly illuminating, as they introduce the main characters, while also providing multiple levels of character motivation, delving into their inner psychology, revealing a fairly atypical gang of thieves, including two insiders.  Johnny and his girl Fay (Coleen Gray) set the stage, as she’s a complete contrast from the usual femme fatale role, instead showing an intense devotion to Johnny.  Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer), the track bartender, has a bedridden wife at home, while the crooked cop, Officer Randy Kennan (Ted de Corsia), is up to his ears in debt to loan sharks, while George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr.), a half-pint window teller at the track, is in over his head in a masochistic relationship to his disinterested, money-grubbing wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), spilling the beans to her about the upcoming heist while she’s two-timing him with another man, Val Cannon (Vince Edwards), who then wants a piece of the action.  The odd man out is Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen), whose bankroll is financing the operation, with suggestions of a homoerotic subtext with Johnny.    

In addition, Johnny has hired two specialists to perform specific functions that are not part of the five-way split, knowing nothing about the overall operation, and paid up front not to ask questions.  Professional wrestler and chess master (and philosopher) Kola Kwariani plays Maurice, paid to start a fight with the bartender and create a disturbance, distracting track cops from the heist taking place, while oddball movie psychopath Timothy Carey is Nikki Arane, a lunatic gun nut and sharpshooter, is paid to shoot the lead horse during the high stakes race, creating yet another distraction, slowing the crowd’s mad dash to collect their winnings.  Influenced by the success of John Huston’s THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), it spawned a whole subset of crime heist movies, all exploiting a headlines-grabbing event, the January 1950 robbery of the Brinks Armored truck office in Boston, at the time the largest heist in American history.  The Halloween mask that Johnny uses for the crime mirrors the method used by the Brinks robbers.  While Sterling Hayden is connected to Huston’s film, appearing as a gunman, three members of this cast, Hayden, Ted de Corsia and Timothy Carey, appeared together the previous year in the low-budget noir film, André de Toth’s Crime Wave (1954), also featuring a near documentary style, while the art director, Ruth Sobotka, was Kubrick’s wife at the time, who amazingly drew charcoal drawings of every scene for the actors to study.  This film’s hard-boiled script represents a giant leap forward in quality from his earlier work, with Kubrick masterfully accentuating the meticulous precision needed to carry out this master heist, billed as the perfect crime, eventually thwarted by human fallabilities, a theme returned to frequently by Kubrick, including LOLITA (1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), where most of his career, with the exception of Kirk Douglas in PATHS OF GLORY (1957) or Spartacus (1960), Kubrick displayed a preference for flawed protagonists who aren’t particularly virtuous or admirable, finding anti-heroes who are by no means sympathetic.  Despite Hayden’s rock solid performance as the tight-lipped, perfectly chiseled, hard-nosed protagonist, emulating the virile masculinity of film noir, we never penetrate his inner psyche, knowing nothing about his backstory other than the knowledge he served 5 long years in prison, so while he has his appeal (and legions of followers), the film itself is tinged with an existential noirish fatalism, with the narrator at one point informing viewers that this could be the last day in Johnny’s life, reminded at every turn how easily things could go off the rails, where instead of one man standing out, the beauty of the film is the emphasis on the coordinated planning and execution, where each one is an essential cog in the overall success of the plan, continually offering shifting points of view.  Young gun Quentin Tarantino was so enthralled with the nervy Kubrick style, not just Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), but the climax in Jackie Brown (1997) all emulate what Kubrick does in this film, each one showing different character’s perspectives told out of order, drawing comparisons to Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950), actually receiving a call of support from Marlon Brando afterwards who was impressed by such a distinctive style from a first-time filmmaker.         

While Johnny is singled out with more screen time, as he is the brains behind the operation, it’s curious that no character in the film, including the omniscient narrator, is fortunate enough to have all the information, as each have knowledge of only certain parts of the overall operation as it unfolds, leaving viewers in the most advantageous position, as we see all.  Johnny, for instance, never sees Nikki shoot the lead horse Red Lightning, or sees the cop drive away with the money, or hears the revealing conversations between Sherry and Val opening up a new can or worms, and he is excluded from the startling revelations at their meet site afterwards, arriving late, seeing one of the men covered in blood staggering to his car, beating a hasty retreat away from danger.  Viewers, on the other hand, see every aspect of the robbery, and are privy to the intimate conversations between lovers, which is what makes the jagged storyline all the more intriguing, curious to see how it all plays out.  While the film uses the conventions of 1940’s film noir, wrapped in a fog of an all-encompassing fatalism, filled with archetypal characters that we immediately recognize, it’s the unfamiliar elements Kubrick brings to the story that are most fascinating, where he expertly blends the familiar with the unfamiliar, something he does with all his films, no two of which are the same, combining elements of classical Hollywood with a more modernist technique, always finding new material that stands on its own, becoming something we’ve never really seen before.  Other films have used fragmented narrative methods before, but not to the extent that it becomes the organizing principle of the film aesthetic.   Members of the gang rarely see one another during the course of the heist, becoming glaringly obvious when they do intersect, if only for a brief moment, using double takes, returning again and again to the same moment in time, but from a different perspective, pushing the conventional obsession with time to the breaking point, with Kubrick literally replaying his narrative, continually accumulating more clues, creating a puzzle for the audience to piece together, where the fragmentary structure only heightens the interest.  The taut manner in which it all unfolds, with near mathematical precision, provides a good likelihood that they can ultimately get away with it, even if they are an unlikely group of small timers, and they very nearly do pull it off.  If not for a Hitchcockian device so brilliantly used in The Birds (1963), introducing a persnickety old woman in her 80’s, Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies), as a know-it-all who views herself as an ornithological expert, insisting “Birds are not aggressive creatures,” while here Kubrick introduces another chatty old grandmother (Cecil Elliott) at the airport, holding a diminutive poodle that she obviously spoils and dotes upon, but allows the poodle to escape and erratically create enough havoc at the airport terminal that Johnny’s dreams simply evaporate into thin air.  So close, and yet so far.  Like the crime itself, it’s an almost perfect film experience.   

The Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick • Cinephilia & Beyond