Year: 1957
Director: Samuel Fuller
Stars: Barry Sullivan, Barbara Stanwyck, Dean Jagger
Sam Fuller always aimed to open his movies with an explosion of action to grip an audience from the opening frames. Think the tempestuous domestic set-to and wig-whipping gusto of The Naked Kiss, for instance. Favourite of the French New Wave (Godard loved it), Forty Guns opens with a stampede. All forty guns astride their forty horses as they cascade down a hillside, enveloping an unsuspecting wagon. The John Ford envisioned in Spielberg’s The Fabelmans barks advice about making a horizon line interesting (delivered excellently by David Lynch in the part). Fuller’s opening to Forty Funs adheres to such advice stupendously. The sky is but a clipped thumbnail at the top of the picture, accentuating this thrilling, rapid descent, skewing the picture downward. Down into the mess.
It isn’t the last time Fuller’s western feels cinematic, forward thinking, influential.
Fuller movies often feature a Griff. Forty Guns has a great one. Interrupted during some valued time in the Tombstone bathhouse by a ruckus in town, Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) dresses and strides into town to confront the disruptors. Fuller features his legs, black and long in the frame, making Griff feel like a giant. He walks steadily, emotionless toward his prey; rambunctious hooligan Brockie Drummond (John Ericson), leader of the gang kicking up fuss in the thoroughfare. Fuller – a full decade before Leone – fills the frame with an extreme close up of Sullivan’s eyes as he strides. The ultimate conclusion of the standoff isn’t nearly as powerful as its palpably tense build-up.
Not all that long after, while assessing rifles at a store with coquettish gunsmith Wiley (Neyle Morrow), Griff’s brother Wes (Gene Barry) sizes her up… down the sights of the gun. Suddenly, surprisingly, we see down the barrel. Not only does the shot feel dangerously lurid (a literal mixture of sex and death), but Fuller has managed to prefigure another staple that the ’60s would birth; the cinematic adventures of 007. Spaghetti Westerns and Bond have been invented and it’s not even the end of the first act.
Freed from jail by his older sister – the barnstorming leader of those forty guns, Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) – Brockie convenes for a hilltop tryst with his exotic gal Rio (Ziva Rodann). Fuller shoots down on the two of them as they roll in the dirt. The audience has the God’s eye view. There is no skyline. Are we being invited to judge? It might not sound like much, but it’s deeply unconventional. Certainly more than is required for an 80-minute western during the start of the genre’s complacent decline.
Forty Guns is a strange favourite of mine, a movie that feels as though it flits around a little before getting to the point, playing coy with who its leads are going to turn out to be, giving us little asides here and there. It paints an economic portrait of community, counting on certain archetypes that the audience knows and understands in order to set up a number of its dramas. All around it, of course, is Stanwyck, one of the all-time great leading ladies and no stranger to playing powerful women in westerns. Hell, I’ve already covered her commanding turn in Anthony Mann’s stellar 1950s saga The Furies in this very essay series.
Her Jessica Drummond stalks the edges of Forty Guns. She’s the lead with really quite minimal screen time. In truth the movie is an ensemble piece, but Stanwyck is felt even when she’s not on screen. A strong woman presiding over a world of men governed by ineffectual law.
It feels like damning a movie with feint praise to suggest it’s story is one you can take or leave, move in and out of, pay attention to or not… but this is often how I experience Forty Guns. It moves in front of me and I’m not always fully in its narrative. But it’s collective collage is something immensely evocative and incredibly appealing; a deeply stylised impression of the western, one that makes me feel as though I’m watching the best scenes of many. It’s an epitome film.
This tapestry-like quality makes it one that fades a little once you’re away from it. I struggle to remember the full arc. Am hard-pressed to describe its events accurately or authentically. But then I’ll feel a strong desire to go back to it, like an itch you need to scratch, and that sense of macro evocation floods back in. There are touches of noir in intimate scenes, like the one in which Wes quizzes Wiley about a discarded shell, the both of them hatched in shadow to make them look like jailbirds, not lovebirds.
Bit-by-bit Griff and Jessica come to size one another up. Both are flanked by oft-absent brothers, making Forty Guns come to feel like a stand-off between families. Dynasties vying for some semblance of control or dominion over the frontier lands surrounding Tombstone. This conflict – sometimes amorphous, sometimes in sharp focus – gives the film a constantly shifting tempestuous feel, one made literal on the screen when a twister zooms through, overpowering a scene. Again Fuller shoots down, inclined to play the event like some kind of wrath of God. Griff and Jessica don’t just seem pitted against one another, but against some cruel elemental force. Life in the west, as depicted here by Fuller, seems almost at odds with nature. Man rallying against all sense with a bullheaded stubbornness. The storm may pass, but not the unease. Who knows when the next will blow.
In the aftermath of the twister we find Griff and Jessica sheltered in a barn somewhere, and it looks like a post-coital confessional. Defenses are down. Maybe the storm was another kind of metaphor. A meteorological erogenous zone. Jessica tries using her wiles to get Griff on her side. To come across, be mercenary for her. Fuller dims to black, leaving us unsure of her success, and intimating – if they haven’t already – that the two might make some other physical pact together. In his blowhard book Cinema Speculation Tarantino blithely decrees the ’50s as Hollywood’s most boring era because it was at the heel of the Hays Code (a baffling statement). I’d argue that the intimations of the era’s masters are as creative and telling as the explicit scenes that would roll in after.
There’s a case to be made that Forty Guns falls into the subgenre of the feminist western or, at least, a subversive western. Obviously there’s the power and leadership exhibited by Stanwyck’s Jessica, but there are moments that chisel at the western’s stereotypical depictions of men to further the contrast. After one reel ends on a shocking, maudlin reveal, the next opens with chirpy upbeat music and we’re back to the bathhouse and the men – gritty when exhibiting themselves about town – seem gleeful, childish, almost girlish.
Elsewhere, Forty Guns is interrupted on a handful of occasions… for songs. Musical numbers. One jovial, one sombre, and these most emotionally available of moments are all sung by men. It’s not a forced inversion across the entire film (though Dean Jagger’s Sheriff Ned Logan is clearly subservient to Jessica, crushing on her, supplicant to her), but it is persistent enough to fold Forty Guns in with the other feminine deviations across the genre’s checkered history. The aforementioned The Furies, Nicholas Ray’s roaring Johnny Guitar, Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. Hell. I’m a sucker for them all…
If Forty Guns‘ biggest weakness is that it feels kind of patchwork, pieced from the familiar, its power is in how it upends and experiments with those conventions scene-by-scene. Here, oddly, the parts are greater than their sum. If it hangs together a little rickety, the watching remains magnetic because any given scene could turn on a dime. A collection of stark stylistic enquiries into what the western is, or can be.
The Lost Highway Hotel 