Take 64: Johnny Guitar

In July of 2015, the BBC released a list of the 100 Greatest American Films, curated by polling critics all over the world. I’m watching them and writing about them as a form of self taught film school. This week… we’re doing number 64, Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. As always, there will be spoilers.

When I saw that my next movie was Johnny Guitar I didn’t know what to expect, but the saturated red and yellows on the title screen communicated right away that we were heading back out to the glory of the American west. I thought I knew what to expect — an unwitting hero who is forced to save a group of unfortunate homesteaders when what he really wants is to strum his instrument and live a quiet frontier life. I wasn’t exactly right and I wasn’t exactly wrong but I can say that the naming of this film is misleading. This is Joan Crawford’s film from beginning to end.

The name Joan Crawford evokes a certain era of cinema similar to hearing Cary Grant or James Stewart. She’s the type of performer whose off screen presence outgrew her onscreen talents. To be honest, I’ve seen little of her work and tend to picture Jessica Lange playing Crawford opposite Susan Sarandon playing Bette Davis in Feud: Bette and Joan — the much acclaimed FX miniseries that dramatically recreates the famous escalation of tension between the two stars as they costarred together in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Besides that two-for-the-price-of-one biopic, my only other association with Joan was hand me down tales I heard about Mommy Dearest (which I’ve never seen) and rogue references to “wire hangers”.

I’m not sure if this film could be seen as a departure for her acting style, but it seems on brand even with my limited knowledge of her work. Her face was perfect for the role, sharp and severe, she has the look of someone you know you don’t want to fuck with. She exudes power, and when it’s eventually revealed that she summoned her ex-flame, Johnny Guitar as a hired gun, that this was not a damsel in distress.

Part of the reason she needed Johnny’s assistance was because of the escalating tension between she and the cattle drivers in town, led by another formidable woman, Emma (played by Mercedes McCambridge). Crawford plays saloon / casino owner Vienna, who managed to successfully find independence for herself and identify the best location in the territory to take advantage of a future railroad extension. The idea is that the railroad will build a station near her property and she will reap the benefits of incoming travelers, while the cattle owners who rely on vast unoccupied land, fear they’ll be driven out as the town expands and becomes a settlement. This is the central conflict of a film that is then dappled with other flimsy reasoning — but what makes the film great is the hatred between the two female leads.

This was an entirely unexpected, and wildly exciting discovery for me, as I would never have predicted that a film called Johnny Guitar would be one of the most feminist films to make the cut on the top 100 list.

Consider the moment that the veil comes down between Johnny and Vienna. He questions if she waited for him, and how exactly she became financially independent without a male benefactor — a rarity in 1954 when the film was released, let alone in the 1800s. She answers neither question directly but does manage to eviscerate the gendered double standard with a few choice quips:

Johnny: How many men have you forgotten?

Vienna: As many women as you’ve remembered.

Or,

Vienna: 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.

Here is a woman who makes her own path in life, and doesn’t care if people raise their eyebrows as she passes by. This isn’t to say that she’s heartless, she appears to be loyal, non-judgemental, a great boss — but she conquers her demons both internally and externally as she crawls inch by inch toward her goal of financial freedom. Johnny could have been cut from the movie in my opinion, and probably wouldn’t have been missed.

Reading Roger Ebert’s piece on the film, I was surprised that he identified some lesbian themes that didn’t occur to me. As a well practiced queer women, I typically have a very keen eye for movies that should have had some gay moments (see: Bring it On, 10 Thing I Hate About You, Dirty Dancing, etc.). He makes a solid point, that while both women are given male love interests which float like a weird halo around their motivations, they are totally unnecessary and the women seem far more focused on each other. Their eyes bare into each other, aflame with jealousy that is hard to attribute to their respective trysts. As Ebert points out,

I wonder if they even openly spoke of the movie’s buried themes. One is certainly bisexualism; Crawford’s tavern-owner Vienna is, it is claimed, in love with “Johnny Guitar” but has not seen him in five years. She effortlessly turns tough hombres into girly-men, and her bartender observes to Johnny, “I never met a woman who was more man.” Her archenemy Emma is allegedly in love with “The Dancin’ Kid”and is jealous because he is allegedly in love with Vienna. But there is hardly a moment when Emma can tear her eyes away from Vienna to glance at the Kid. All of the sexual energy is between the two women, no matter what they say about the men. Crawford wanted Claire Trevor for the role, but the studio, perhaps having studied the script carefully, insisted on McCambridge, who was not a lesbian but played one, as they say, in the movies.

This is certainly true, and arguably the cornerstone of greatness in the film. The women have a taut relationship, brimming with emotion and their performance elicits emotion that is rarely achievable outside of real, intimate, relationships.

Ebert suggests that much of the film was an allegory examining the McCarthy era influence over film making, where actors were asked to name names and choose loyalties. That certainly didn’t occur to me while I was watching but I did find the rally speech where she’s preying on the fears of what and who the railroad could bring to be surprisingly relevant to our current stokes of national xenophobia and fear mongering.

As we’ve seen repeatedly proven over the course of our journey with these films, the West provides a blank setting canvas where psychology, nature, and the conflict between nationalism and freedom can be examined under the hot desert sun. I learned from Ebert’s piece on the film that it was Crawford who originally bought the film rights for this novel and I hope that it’s because she identified with Vienna and wanted to position herself for the role. This is consistent with the mystique surrounding her legacy, and now I’ll picture her with a gun belt or defiantly playing a tune on a piano while asserting her right to exist in a town that wants to ban her. Crawford owns an era of cinema, and this film demonstrates her undeniable prowess and contribution to the art.