Forty Guns

A genre and gender-bender blending barn burner of a boho brute with a branding iron, Forty Guns, like Johnny Guitar before it, shakes the change out of Oscar Wilde’s jean pockets and kisses Gertrude Stein on the Stetson topped, kissy-faced head. Fuller - Old School cigar-chomping mensch, crime lit journo, and all around life of the party - really takes to the new panoramapanoptic canvas of cinemascope like it were an old war buddy with good Scotch in this whacked-out masterpiece depicting the expressionistic sexual humiliation, from topmost top to bottommost bottom, of an entire frontier community. It's as wired and boastfully inimical an exercise in widescreen wonders gone willfully wrong as Nicholas Ray’s once titanic, now nearly forgotten domesticity-trap rig-up Bigger Than Life (made the year before), and a staggering juggling act of mad extremities running hot as hell with glossy orbs of musical theater surrealism threatening to crash through the plate-glass floor at any moment. Stanwyck’s Jessica Drummond definitely wears the pants in this particular county, but that don’t mean every single feller ain’t angling to get in them thar pants. Steady boys, lest the bullwhip be heard to crack and spit sparks! Whatever Jessica is, though, the sexual poles that she plays against one another are eventually going to send back a shockwave big enough to buck her out of the saddle wherefore psychosexually motivated prairie tornadoes cannot. Many have written about how the titular group of ‘yes mam’ men are perhaps named for what is dangling between their respective legs as opposed to what is strapped to their sides with the safety on. Fuller himself has said as much. All well and good. But nobody warns you about the crossfire. Or the social rituals we invent to sublimate the practice of incest-at-a-distance passions in our own lives, every time we try to deny it of ourselves. A very favorite favortite.