Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947) had invented the noir Western, with Anthony Mann’s The Furies (1950), Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952) and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) following suit. The last of these, “a minor film grown to achieve the status of a classic” (Martin Scorsese), inspired the French New Wave. In the U.S. it is best remembered for its delirious Freudianism—at one point gunfighter Johnny Logan, a.k.a. Johnny Guitar, expresses his prowess and bottled-up rage by flinging his gun from hand to hand—and for brilliantly capturing the mood of Joseph McCarthy’s America, as a posse is incited to become a lynching mob by Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge, ferocious), whose bank has been robbed, and who wants her romantic rival, saloon-owner Vienna (Joan Crawford, at her most nuanced and sexually charged), who everyone knows is innocent, to be among those hanged. With the promise of a spared life, the youngest member of the gang that performed the robbery, who, wounded, was left behind and caught, gives up Vienna’s name as being “one of them,” sending to the rope the maternal woman who was his first crush. Plainly Ray, working from Philip Yordan’s script (based on Roy Chanslor’s novel), sees 1950s McCarthyism as a twisted madness, given wondrously ironic historical translation in post-Civil War Arizona by the coming railroad that, as Emma puts it, threatens to bring in “dirt farmers” who will squeeze out current residents—a touch of her appeal to the posse that all of a sudden renews the currency of Ray’s film amidst the “illegal” immigrant debate. In a bold stroke, Ray portrays the chief witch-hunter as a witch herself: shooting down the oil-lamp chandelier in Vienna’s gambling establishment, Emma is an infernal madwoman gleefully presiding over the blaze.
Vienna and Emma are both capitalists selfishly pursuing personal profit, and they end up in a shoot-out after Johnny has saved Vienna, the woman he loves, from the rope. During the aborted hanging, it is fascinating to watch Crawford/Vienna’s neck inch toward the rope. Four years earlier, in The Damned Don’t Cry (Vincent Sherman), depressingly Crawford’s face had repeatedly flung itself into the slaps being administered to her character; but Ray uses his star’s legendary masochism for a gleaming psychological insight. In a gesture he captures his nation’s enormous capacity for self-pity and self-loathing. One recalls at that exquisite moment that Vienna earlier had castigated Johnny, her lover whom she ditched five years earlier, over his self-pity. These two were made for each other—and for the country they inhabit.
In truth, Ray’s film is fairly clunkish as it attempts to bring in a variety of classic Western elements, which do not always mix smoothly with the noir elements; and one never quite believes in Vienna and Johnny as a couple. (Once again, Crawford is too much woman for any man.) It is also the case that a principal theme gets shuffled and somewhat lost: Johnny’s (and America’s) attempt to leave congenital violence behind and be peaceable. But as a transmutation of the homefront insanity in an early arctic blast of the post-World War II Cold War, which (like its Iraqi War half a century later) was almost entirely of America’s own invention, it is a compelling study; and Victor Young’s heart-piercing melody, which immerses the Vienna-Johnny relationship in longing and memory, is wonderful, as is that amazing moment when, in a film where Vienna is constantly getting wet, her white dress goes up in flames while she is wearing it. “Johnny!” she shouts, with Crawford unerringly extending the second syllable to grueling and haunting effect.
